The Android community had been quite persistent over the past few years with regards to gaining the freedom to unlock the boot loader of their phones. With no safe technical solution at hand, Sony Ericsson had been pretty vocal about evading the requests so far. The official SE Developer blog now reveals that a solution is on the way. Soon, developers and users will have the power to unlock the boot loader for certain 2011 Xperia phones.
The list of phones that are open for this feature include Xperia arc, neo, pro and Play. The attribute will however be possible only for select releases of the handsets. The phone in question will have to conform to specific requirements like it shouldn’t be SIM lock protected. The market and original configuration of the handset will also be a deciding factor.
Users can gauge if their handset will be able to unlock the boot loader by simply connecting it to the Fastboot tool in the Android SDK. Upon successfully connecting to Fastboot, users should be able to unlock smoothly. Users may want to note that they could void the warranty of their phone should they decide to unlock. Also, the tweaked phone software may put Sony Ericsson’s repair network in an improper condition as per standard methods.
In the event a warranty repair is conducted, users may be charged a handling fee. Sony Ericsson also forewarns that only advanced developers with adequate technical knowledge about the risks should go ahead with unlocking the boot loader. With there being no need for standard users to unlock it, the company strictly advises against it. Later, a web service featuring an unlock boot loader key will be launched to enable this.
With no phone updates needed to get this functionality up and running, this opportunity will be enabled later this spring.