Earlier in the week, we picked up on a trending topic over at the XDA forums that caused quite a stir in the Android community – the G2 was unrootable. According to the New America Foundation, the G2 has an embedded chip that resets the G2’s software back to “stock” once the device has been rebooted.
T-Mobile has responded to the situation with the following statement:
As 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.
[via Androinica]