Oh, LG, I want to love you but I can't. Just when we think you may make it in the smartphone world, you go and do this. You make good latest mobile phones, not great phones; you raise the bar, but only so much; and now you're locking bootloaders? Let's do the math: that's two tiny steps forward and a mile jog in the opposite direction of other Android OEMs.
When it comes to smartphones – or mobile tablets – specifications are only half the story. A dual-core processor, 1GB RAM, awesome camera and high resolution display only account for a portion of a customers' love for their Android phone. Without development support, a lot of tinkering users may be left mostly unsatisfied down the road. The initial excitement can quickly run out after several bugs – likely due to an OEM's custom software, which can easily be solved with a custom ROM – surface.
This has proven to be the case with some of the most popular HTC and Motorola Android devices. Take the ThunderBolt for instance. I loved the phone when I bought it. Sure, it was a little bulky and battery life was a joke, but it was blazing fast on Verizon's LTE network and features like the camera and Dolby Surround speaker were definitely lovable.
After a month or so of running stock software on the TBolt, my nerves began to wear thin. Text messages would randomly disappear, I would receive false notifications for text messages and emails and sometimes cross-carrier text messages would repeatedly fail to send. Battery life was still laughable after switching LTE off and intermittent lag ultimately led me to root the phone and load third-party software. After making the trek over to a popular Android development forum, I found that third-party development was rather sparse as the ThunderBolt was one of the most locked down phones to date and because it used an entirely different radio configuration than any of its predecessors. Long story short, I dealt with this nonsense for three more long months before jumping ship to the iPhone.
Source
When it comes to smartphones – or mobile tablets – specifications are only half the story. A dual-core processor, 1GB RAM, awesome camera and high resolution display only account for a portion of a customers' love for their Android phone. Without development support, a lot of tinkering users may be left mostly unsatisfied down the road. The initial excitement can quickly run out after several bugs – likely due to an OEM's custom software, which can easily be solved with a custom ROM – surface.
This has proven to be the case with some of the most popular HTC and Motorola Android devices. Take the ThunderBolt for instance. I loved the phone when I bought it. Sure, it was a little bulky and battery life was a joke, but it was blazing fast on Verizon's LTE network and features like the camera and Dolby Surround speaker were definitely lovable.
After a month or so of running stock software on the TBolt, my nerves began to wear thin. Text messages would randomly disappear, I would receive false notifications for text messages and emails and sometimes cross-carrier text messages would repeatedly fail to send. Battery life was still laughable after switching LTE off and intermittent lag ultimately led me to root the phone and load third-party software. After making the trek over to a popular Android development forum, I found that third-party development was rather sparse as the ThunderBolt was one of the most locked down phones to date and because it used an entirely different radio configuration than any of its predecessors. Long story short, I dealt with this nonsense for three more long months before jumping ship to the iPhone.
Source
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