Microsoft To Work With Windows Phone 7 Jailbreakers

markass530 writes "Microsoft had a sit down with the first people to jailbreak their Windows Phone 7. Seems like good progress was made. This seems like a good approach to me. It would be great if Sony, Apple, Microsoft, and several Android phone makers would implement a simple development switch in their phones — these would obviously void the warranty, but it would give hackers the opportunity to actually own their devices without fear of having to jailbreak all over again whenever an update arrives."

Palm is very supportive of this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Palm (now HP, I guess) tells you how to enter "developer mode" for WebOS on their own website: http://developer.palm.com/index.php?option=com_content&id=1639#InstallingEclipsewiththeSDK-dev_mode [palm.com] Developer mode on a WebOS phone is the same as jailbreaking on iOS/Android: it allows you access to the file system, a command line if you want it, and the ability to install applications from any source. There is a LOT of homebrew development for the platform, and all of it is officially supported by Palm/HP. They even recently donated a server to a homebrew dev group.

Re:Voiding the warranty

[Hobbex]

PCs come "jailbroken" by default. It didn't void the warranty on my PC when I installed Linux on it. Why should smartphones (which are just pocket sized computers) be any different?

Re:Voiding the warranty

[Tacvek]

Any phone that allows substantial screwing with the the RF output of the phone is using a poorly designed cellular modem chip (baseband). Short of altering the baseband firmware, the worst that a phone should be able to do is a limited denial of service attack (such as mass producing SMS messages or rapidly starting a phone or data connection, and then droping it before it is fully established, and repeating).

That said I will admit that there are some rather poor baseband chips out there, which let the main processor specify important RF parameters.

Re:Voiding the warranty

[drinkypoo]

Your warranty depends on terms of your purchase. Dell could argue that you voided your warranty because the PC is no longer the same OS.

No, they can not, at least not in the USA. The Magnuson-Moss warranty act prohibits it.

Apple lets you jail break your iPhone; don't ever bring it in for support if you do. .

As has been pointed out already ad nauseam, you have a legal right to warranty hardware service on your iPhone whether you have jailbroken it or not. They might reasonably refuse you software service.