T-Mobile G2: Hardware restrictions against rooting

This move has led many people in the Android community in an uproar as now they see it possible to lock down a phone that once use to pride itself on the ability to customize, hack, and personalize your phone because you bought it and it is yours.

A T-Mobile representative released this statement concerning the reset feature after rooting.

Code-Level Modifications to the G2As pioneers in Android-powered mobile devices, T-Mobile and HTC strive to support innovation.  The T-Mobile G2 is a powerful and highly customizable Android-powered smartphone, which customers can personalize and make their own, from the look of their home screen to adding their favorite applications and more.

The HTC software implementation on the G2 stores some components in read-only memory as a security measure to prevent key operating system software from becoming corrupted and rendering the device inoperable. There is a small subset of highly technical users who may want to modify and re-engineer their devices at the code level, known as “rooting,” but a side effect of HTC’s security measure is that these modifications are temporary and cannot be saved to permanent memory.  As a result the original code is restored.

There is still a possibility that there will be fix on the hackers side to allow for permanent root changes, but for now we have to take it for what it’s worth. Back when I had my My-Touch 3G, hacking that phone made it highly enjoyable for me but with my Nexus One I no longer see a point. For most people it’s all about preference now, but back in the beginning people like me would root out a phone to gain more functionality. I don’t think it’s a big deal, but I do feel that if you are going to boast about freedom of customization and personalization than it should be an open standard across the board.