Ian Renton« Blog
The Problem with Phone Upgrades
This is an pretty old post from my blog, which has been preserved in case its content is of any interest. You might want to go back to the homepage to see some more recent stuff.
I am due to upgrade my mobile phone in a couple of months, so yet again it’s time to pick the best of a generally bad bunch that I will be lumbered with for the next two years. Roughly speaking, my choice is:
| Phone | Decent hardware | Software updates | Good battery life | Rootable in perpetuity | New and interesting | No need to change desktop OS |
| Galaxy S III | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| HTC One X | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Galaxy Nexus | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Droid RAZR MAXX | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| iPhone 4S | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
| Lumia 900 | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | No |
Please, phone manufacturers, make a phone that has more than three of the things in this table. Just for once.
Comments
Sureely the iPhone is rootable
Not in perpetuity (which was probably a poor way of phrasing it). What I mean is, because Android releases the OS code as AOSP, you can replace your stock OS with one based on AOSP so that you will always be able to maintain root access while receiving OS upgrades.
Apple do not release the code to allow others to build custom versions of iOS -- so although iOS devices can be jailbroken, every time the OS is updated by Apple, hackers must find a new exploit in order to re-enable jailbreaking.
I will root/jailbreak whatever device I get, but I prefer the security of knowing that I will be able to update my OS regularly and maintain root access, rather than having to hold off on updating until some enterprising hacker has found another hole to exploit to get my root back again.