Motorola bucks its own trend, leaves Xoom bootloader unlockable

Pretty much everything coming out of Moto these days is saddled with a tightly-locked bootloader paired with one tamper-resistant scheme or another , making custom kernels — the lifeblood of the phone hacking community — tricky at best, nigh impossible at worst. Of course, there was a glimmer of hope last month when the company said that it was working on a solution that’d cater to the developer community, and it looks like the Xoom might be bearing some of that fruit: the bootloader can be unlocked and relocked at will. Now, we’re thinking that Moto might’ve loosened the reigns a bit here simply because the Xoom is running a completely bone-stock build of Android and, as Honeycomb’s launch device, Google might be showing some influence behind the scenes (the Nexus One and Nexus S both have unlockable bootloaders, for instance)… but it’s a good sign. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Motorola bucks its own trend, leaves Xoom bootloader unlockable originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 17:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Posted by on February 22, 2011. Filed under News, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry