Verizon’s much-vaunted iPhone killer and follow-up to the popular Droid has blown it. Or more correctly, it has blown up.
The device, which promised to be Verizon’s most serious competitor to the iPhone, has been hamstrung with a crude hardware-based method of bootloader protection called an eFuse chip. If it doesn’t detect the standard bootloader when the phone is turned on, it is supposed to blow out a fuse. Which, in turn, essentially turns your brand-new DroidX into a very expensive paperweight. The fuse is only replaceable with Motorola service equipment.
This becomes a serious problem when you realize that if you’re going to root the phone to install Froyo or mod the device, you need to mess around with the bootloader.
In short, this is an appallingly stupid move by Motorola.
Despite the fact that the eFuses are present on the Droid and its GSM twin, the Milestone, some Android fans have asserted that they have not been used to lock the hardware until now. As many Android fans know, the Droid is incredibly hackable and the Milestone decidedly is not. It appears that Motorola has set up the Milestone’s incredibly complex security on top of the tripwire bomb that is the eFuse, which poses quite a tricky task for the Android hacking community.
More importantly, though, this represents a big chance squandered by Motorola and Verizon to take a big swing at the new iPhone4. Many iPhone competitors had fallen short in consumers’ eyes. The Droid Incredible’s screen wasn’t nice enough. The HTC Hero4G had no battery life. The Nexus One was only available on T-Mobile. The Samsung Galaxy S family just didn’t quite have the sexiness of the iPhone4.
The DroidX is mean, lean, sexy, fast, and it could hold a charge for more than five minutes. However, it shipped with a clunky version of Motorola’s Motoblur Android skin. Motoblur is awful. It’s clunky, slow and doesn’t work as well as Android’s native apps.
This wasn’t an issue to many users, however. Most wanted to root the phone, load it with Froyo and have fun with it. With this issue, though, Verizon has completely lost those customers.
You can hold this phone any way you want, but that doesn’t matter if it blows up when you try to get rid of Motoblur.
Thanks to Gizmodo for the images.
Grand… iPhone wins again! Not that I care either way. I have iPhone 4, no issues with it, am willing to try any device, but this news blows me away (pun intended). Is Motorola run by a slough of Doofi/Doofuses?
Motorola rocks and the Droid X does also…. This article is #@#$
THIS is JUST APPLE FAN BOYS BLOWING GOOBERS on DROID X!
Don’t worry it’s like these iNazis are all yelling fire over nothing. In fact the same technology is in iPhones within A4 Arm chip SoC! haha… Jacob must be one of the Generals in Apple’s Thought Police (iGestapo) Regiments. You know….. in charge of disseminating mis-information, etc. Most likely doesn’t even know what an eFuse is or what it’s used for even. It’s a scare tactic of Apple ALARMISTS to smash the sale of DROIDS (because of their own antenna etc problems)!
eFuse was developed during the STI Group’s working on the Cell BE processor for Ken Kutaragi. It is only capable of shutting it’s own particular pathway down within the logic layer…. within a chip’s structure. They’re not replaceable and are self healing. IBM has now licensed them to Intel, Moto Freescale, AMD/ATI, Nvidia, Arm, etc.
They are used in iMac chips including i7′s and are part of the reason these computers were having refusal to boot problems too. Though they are not the cause themselves. But they are just that… self healing fuses. Their problem is in Apple’s own firmware/software. Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 and others have a security glitch in their firmware that also causes them to not boot or not be read at boot!
The problem (when popped) occurs when temperatures or current are sensed out of range. That’s it!!! ….but they are rooted in secure vault processing of data just like in PS3′s Cell and most any chip that uses them and that’s about all of them!
It has to do with irregular data entered for processing on the chip. Also as a security feature according to a company’s own programing of firmware. As I said, every consumer, industrial and military application system on the planet most likely uses these today. They can malfunction (rare)….. or the instruction sets can be written improperly. In this case, a firmware update can take care of it. It’s not a hardware issue unless connected to hardware failure (overheating or bad code entered). That’s all there is to it!
NOW go back to class and be good little Apple iNazis!
btw… look up eFuse at IBM before you all mess your pants over a product you most don’t own or intend to purchase even! :P
here are the instructions on how to flash your DROID X
http://droidx.net/droid-x-news/droid-x-hacks-how-to-root-droid-x/
@THE MONK Why mislead people with the delusion that it is even possible to Flash their Droid X phone with any system image other than an authenticated Motorola one. If data has been changed before entering the secure vault on their chip, it simply won’t compute and spits out instead what it was fed. So then the phone simply goes into secure recovery mode. It’s an embedded OS…. we don’t have nanogear tools small enough to get past this and most likely never will!
But yes the system has been rooted, but they haven’t even seen what they can do or get away with yet and no the phone isn’t ever going to explode. All eFuses are…… is self healing circuit restrictors or blocks in logic of the chip!!!
Joke of the century.
iPhone 4 wins? :D
Atleast I dont have to buy a pair of forceps to hold my phone to stay connected on a call :D
Apple forgot while designing the iPhone that it was a phone in the first place :D
And you forgot that you can’t trust everything the media says. It’s just a hype. I don’t know any iPhone 4 user (including myself) that has signal issues.
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Dawjaw is in denial. Still believes the earth is flat, fish have legs and iPwnes are made to make phone calls! haha… …..doesn’t even believe that Stolen proto-type iP4 were remotely bricked by eFuses or that the Woz is lying when he says his iP4′s drop calls and his jail broken iPhone got bricked by Apple! :P Take your Meds Dawjaw! ….ooops! At least “fira” realizes iPhones are just disguised iPods! Too bad Apple fans don’t realize that! :P
I had terrible service with the AT&T iPhone. So did my wife, best friend and most of the iPhone users i know. Maybe its the area we’re in but regardless, it sucked.
My Verizon DroidX works flawlessly everywhere! No dropped calls or dead zones. Love it.
A more apt question; is Apple run by a bunch of iDoofi/iDoofuses like you (in thinking that in the first place… LAMEBOY) in making a phone you can’t hold right for fear of holding it wrong. Go back to school and you might want to read about eFuses at IBM before you spread your disease of ignorance!!!
Are you watching AAPL stocks tumble? ahaha…. Just wait till IDC decides against Apple in the very near future and they drop like lead balloons! ;)
Wow. What an obvious legitimacy-lacking article! The percentage of people (read: phone geeks) that actually go through the trouble of installing unofficial, incomplete versions of OS’s on their phones is QUITE small, actually. Not one of my peers with Android devices have them rooted, and this is at a VZW retail store! About half of us (including me) are using Droid X, and it is fast, sexy, and fast! The ‘MotoBlur’ is very lite on the DX–barely noticeable. It is not a hinderence, this time around, and although i have never been a fan of Blur, it’s widgets and functions are easily disabled. Much in contrast to devices like the HTC Incredible, which have a forced proprietary HTC Sense UI.
*** THIS ARTICLE HAS NO MERIT!!! ***
No single phone is an iPhone killer; Android is the death knell.
Wow. What bullcrap. EPIC FAIL MOTOROLA! You suck. Die.
Absolute BS. Most users will not want to root their phone. They will wait for the upgrade. It is not an IPhone, there is no reason to root the phone. There will be zero impact on sales.
The reason people will want to root the phone is to get rid of motoblur. It’s infuriatingly awful and gets in the way of everything. I’ve spent a good amount of time playing around with motoblur devices and they’ve been horrible compared to plain-jane android or sense UI.
In fact, everyone I know who has a motoblur device has rooted it to get rid of the motoblur.
Everyone I know with at Motorola Cliq doesn’t mind motoblur, and one of them have rooted or expressed any interest in rooting. Funny how anecdotal evidence works, no?
So…the droid x has the same efuse chip as the droid and the milestone, neither of which brick themselves. And you think this phone will brick itself because… why exactly? Because “some Android fans have asserted” it? Seriously?
Please stop presenting this speculation and FUD as fact.
(I meant “and not one of them,” not “and one of them.”)
Motoblur is not on Droid X (Motorola says so themselves)! ….it’s just widgets and they can be deactivated with a swipe of your finger!
Now will the crAppleTards please STOP spreading this mis-information. It’s a non-issue for DROID X!!!
Jacob freidman you are by far the worst critic I’ve ever seen. I hope you are fired
Concur!
This is not even a review. You’re just saying you like Droid X. There are a lot of alternatives.
Where did I say this was a review? In any case, the DroidX was anointed by much of the press as the one true iPhone4 Killer (as if there could be only one). The droid incredible is a great phone, as are the Galaxy S family of phones (apparently), but the article was about the DroidX. And it’s unfortunately a flawed device.
It’s a flawed article and EVERY SINGLE PHONE OUT TODAY HAS THE EXACT SAME TECHNOLOGY!
Any phone that is claimed to be Energy Efficient has eFused Circuits within the structure of every OMAP, ARM, NVIDIA, etc chip on a phone!
Search ARM and eFuse or OMAP and eFUSE. Check out Apple and eFuse!
Link to Motorolla telling the TRUTH….. so you alarmist can take and shove it!!! :P
http://mobileandroidnews.com/?p=21389
*caughs* Iphone4 *caughs* Certainly the Iphone4 isn’f flawed because anything Apple is an apparent god-send. Besides, Jacob is right. Why compare Droid X as an Iphone killer when it (x) is clearly far superior?
Good thoughts, though I have to disagree. There are fewer and fewer reasons to root the phones these days, and it seems that the groups who don’t care about rooting them are getting larger.
If people would just take some time to appreciate what you have with the phone, then they shouldn’t be completely changing a phone anyway. Just stop trying to mess with stuff, and the Froyo update will come in time. I don’t blame Motorola at all. I blame the people trying to get stuff before it is released!
The problem is that some of the companies that sell android phones with skins are notoriously awful at producing updates. Exhibit A: Sony’s Xperia X10′s custom skin can only run 1.6
What a crappy post. Motorola has already said that this is a phone for consumers, not rom developers. You should have done a little more research that just speculate that this would deter people from buying it. As for the iphone killer, the iphone killed itself.
the reality is that 97% or more of the folks who will buy this phone or virtually any other don’t even know what rooting is. It’s a small, highly technical community that cares about ‘rooting’ and not really big enough to even classify as a minority, collectively they represent a dot on the page, barely larger than a single outlier in the scheme of things. Now if it bricks the phone in response to tethering via PDANet, that would be a tragedy.
I have a droidx and an incredible. And to be honest i like themoto ui better then the sense. It may not look as snazzy but it has way more features. Especially when connecting to a desk dock and car dock. Moto put a lot of work into this device and I believe it has paid off. And is nothing like the motoblur you see on the backflip which is horrible and unusable.
You people have to understand that the average lay person won’t care to mod the software of the DroidX. In my short time in cell phone sales (2 years) the average person didn’t even know you could unlock the iPhone. Android or iOS. Both are top notch. You can’t go wrong either way it just depends what you want from a phone. IMO…slight edge goes to iPhone.
#1 There is No… MOTOBLUR on Droid X! It just has Widgets installed!!!
#2 Same technology is on EVERY SINGLE phone (including iPhones4) made today!
#3 PSP’s were first mobile devices bricked by default using eFuse Circuits inside Reprogramable Chips (firmware).
#4 Stolen Proto Type iPhone4′s were Bricked using same technology. Older iPhones that were Jail Broken were being bricked by Firmware programming of eFuse Technology back then.
#5 Xbox360′s and PS3′s have been Bricked by using eFuse Technology.
#6 eFuses are Fuses that in themselves can be only used to cut or reduce flow of current through the Logic circuits inside of CPU’s and GPU’s or any ASIC according to how they are programmed in the firmware instruction sets.
In fact today…. you can remotely disable any device that has them and an Internet connection. So this this shouldn’t even be used to put down solely DROIDS. But include iPhone4′s, Galaxy Series, Nokia’s, HTC’s, and any other phone made today!!!! Big Brother is Watching….. lol and YOU ARE NEXT!!! :P haha…. (ok so that’s a bit overly dramatic, but so is this story…. haha)
iPhone users don’t care about hacking their devices by and large. The bootloader lock is the reason why the Droid X isn’t for the nerds and Android buffs out there, but it doesn’t at all preclude the vast majority of Apple’s audience.
Plus you don’t know squat!! The Samsung Galaxy S is the TRUTH!! it has the best screen on the market and Touchwiz happens to be pretty nice. The strategy that Samsung implemented with this phone will have them over taking HTC and make people think twice before buying a iphone. Iphone may still win, but now they have a real competitor. Being on all the major carrier ensures this.
Also incredibly stupid was the decision made by Verizon/Motorola/Blockbuster and others to load the phone with undeletable crapware, such as the Blockbuster app. My PC comes with crapware, but I can get rid of it. That’s fair–I assume the PC is cheaper because of it. But I won’t spend a cent with Blockbuster unless they allow me to delete their app which I have decided not to use. Moto/VZW have said this is a consumer phone? Ok, then respect us.
As a cell phone salesperson for an independently owned verizon wireless, I can speak from more experience than many that customers dont want to root their phone. They want a phone that works right out of the box with out having to do ANYTHING to make it awesome. Out of over 100 Droidx’s I’ve personally sold, no screen problems (though they are there in .01%) no customers mentioning signal loss (appl) and not ONE customer mentioning rooting the phone.
People who want to do stuff like that (myself included) make up less than .0001% of the phone market. If they made up more of a % then Blackberry wouldn’t sell more phones than apple, microsoft, droid, kin, palm, and symbian COMBINED. They want something that works right out of the box.
this site sucks
@Jacob Friedman !!
I’m not sure where you get your information from but obviously you are an iphone fanboy because based on many many reviews and comparison the Droid-x is better than the iPhone in many aspects AS IT IS without rooting. Anyone who roots their phone knows that there could be consequences but all of this has nothing to do with hurting Verizon , Yea I see how bad they are hurting when the phone sold out on its release date 7/15 and won’t ship until 8/3 based on their website lool their sales are up the roof. cmon put some logic in an article next time.
Froyo is coming out anyways so for all those who can’t wait its their problem if they root and end up bricking their phone even though its not true because the DroidX has been successfully rooted yesterday without any issues so again please double check your info before your write a pointless article.
Thanks
@jacobfriedman ,
After reading this article or whatever you wanna call it I can clearly see as the character on the right in this video ;-)
youtube ” iPhone4 vs HTC Evo ” and click on the cartoon video which I’m sure you have seen or maybe not .
again pointless post here , sorry if I repeated myself .
Nice try Jacob. I would not doubt it if you are an agent for the Apple fanatics. Then again, if you are so concerned about eFuse being used in Droidx and it bothers you so much so that you have to whine that loud, why don’t you consider it a challenge and try to defeat it.
In the meantime, allow the rest of us to enjoy the extra security that eFuse provides to our Android handsets. It is about time that Android starts taking security seriously, especially if it wants to impress the enterprise. The idea that want-to-be hackers such as you should be consulted first when taking Android security into question is ridiculously funny and stupid. Stop whining about a good thing. Stop lying about Android security. Silly, laughable claim.
So you’re saying the Droid X sucks because you can’t root it and install an alternative OS? That’s completely ridiculous. A very small % of owners would be interested in that..how many people root an iPhone to replace the native OS???
Motoblur is just fine, by the way. I own a Droid X and love it. I’ll wait for the official Froyo release from Verizon when it’s all baked/tested on Droid X.
Droid blew it when it decided to advertise that Blockbuster is available on the phone. People do not value Blockbuster so if you put something worthless on the phone, it makes the phone all the more worthless.
Is this a “Better Luck next time Droid” for the iphone? haha. I hope they get to fix this phone’s issues and know where they went wrong and do something.
Just shut up! The phone has no issues except for idiots who want to install freak alternative OS images. They already have Android 2.2 updates going out and it’s selling like hotcakes. Any minor (especially compared to that piece of crap iPhone4) are null and void. It’s on a far superior network that doesn’t drop calls the other half of the time that iPwn’d4 funky radio meant for Europe is dropping them.
Droid X Rocks On while iPwn’d flakes out if you touch it wrong! :D
Very lame and misinformed article, is true the protection exists, but it´s not that bad as the article said. After all the iPhone have protection too, and is worst than that because is a politic of a whole platform, and not´s the case in Android.
I have a milestone, rooted, and nothing bad happens, you can´t load a Cyanogen Firmware, but modified originals is no issue. I get off various motorola softwraes of the original phone and is perfectly posible.
Droids rocks, are solid and incredible well constructed phones, a pleasure to hold, talk and use (much more solids than Apples ones taking in cout the movile parts involved against the chepenees of the Apple aproach of solder everything). I recognize if I talk to an iPhone user just for the poor quality sound of the call, that´s not the case in Motorola units. And no, I´m not interested in sold Motorola phones, but the claims in this article are ridiculous.
I have the DROID X and it does everything I need it to. The wife had the iPhone and I was ready to get it. But now that I have tried out the DX I’m glad I didn’t get the iPhone. It ROCKS and is hands down better than iPhone. I use Citrix to get to all my Windows apps, servers, other PCs, etc. (which the iPhone can do as well) but I think it works much better on the DX. IF Verizon has lost any customers do to not getting thru the security on the phone, it’s a minor fraction of the total sales. The iPhone is fun and great for kids and adults alike, but the DX can do all that and is geared for the serious business person as well. Good luck Apple…
I own a DroidX and I love it – except for the preinstalled junk ware the hand-held doesn’t allow you to get rid of. -City ID app, which is a free trial.. the BlockBuster app I’ll never use, Amazon MP3 I also won’t use, Skype Mobile app I don’t use.. the list goes on. They take up space and memory and power and I can’t stand them. The only reason I’ve seriously pondered trying to root my DroidX is just to be able to get rid of the unwanted garbage. Otherwise I really have no need nor express want to do so.
A friend just got a DroidX and loves it. I want to get her a gift card to purchase apps for her Droidx, Is there an app store for the DroidX
Funny how at this point thousands of droidx owners having enjoying their droidx without being affected by this chicken little story.
This was a terrible, poorly written article that appeared to be written by someone who thinks that all phones have to be hacked to give them any legitimacy. The DroidX is fast, convenient to use, and doesn’t drop calls every 10 seconds the way that an iPhone does. I don’t care about a hacker’s ramblings, I just want a phone that does what I need it to do, and the DroidX does that very well, indeed. My daughter has an iPhone 3 in Boston, and her reception is terrible: I have yet to drop a call on my DroidX. I am content to wait until Motorola releases Android 2.2 for the DroidX: I have no reason to hack my phone to get an imperfect copy of an early release of that product.
¿ how much of this is merely hype,spin & ghost-written self-serving
BS !… ¿ by motorola & verizon ? ! ! ? ?
Droidx is very atractiv phone.droidx is also have a large screen @ 4.3inch.so i like a DROIDX…
The Droid X is such a crappy phone. I miss calls constantly because it gets all these apps running in the background and won’t respond. When you finally do get it to respond and run the advanced task killer to kill all the apps (that end up restarting again about 5 seconds later anyway), your caller has gone on living his/her life. Also, it comes with a ton of preinstalled pay service apps that can’t be removed without voiding the warranty, the GPS is incredibly slow and can’t find anything, also, if you want to zoom on the map, you better have good fingers, because it’s almost impossible, but it will disorient the map at the drop of a hat. The only good thing about it is it pretty well eliminates the possibility of texting and driving, or talking and driving, or doing anything while texting or talking, since you have to hit dozens of buttons to find contacts, make calls and send texts. I’m not a huge fan of the iPhone, but at least it works.