HTC rocks! I’m not giving free praise here, but rather reminding you really cares about us, the users… The Taiwanese company just updated its Developer website to support bootloader unlocks for handsets launched after September 2011, so these are new models I’m talking about. The change will be applied in the following weeks and work on models launched before September 2011 will continue.
For now HTC Vivid and HTC Rezound are not on the official list, but rest assured they’re coming. If you don’t know what to make of this piece of news, know that the bootloader is that little piece of code that runs before the OS and that tells the phone what to boot and how to find the necessary system kernel. Without a bootloader, a smartphone wouldn’t boot and the custom ROMs couldn’t make it to the hottest handsets of the moment, so you wouldn’t have Android 4.0 ported on the Galaxy S, for example.
If the bootloader is blocked or encrypted, then it will be hard to get past the protection and flash the device in order to install the custom software available courtesy of the devs and hackers. When it comes to a handset with a locked bootloader, there are still solutions available from hackers, but they’re dangerous enough to brick your unit. To put it short, you surely want an unlocked bootloader on your handset and HTC is offering exactly that. Let’s see what Motorola and Samsung do on that matter now…
