[HTC EVO 3D] CyWhitfield:
Some of you know me. Most of you don't. I don't know what weight, if any, what I have to say will carry.

Nonetheless, I do hope you read this and can appreciate my point of view.

Some background.. My first Android phone was the heroc, and since I bought it eons after initial release, it was already rooted and several alternative ROMs were available, including a still maturing CM 6.x. My second Android phone was the Evo 4G, again bought some time after its release, and root and CM were already available and improving day by day. In both cases, we had phones with relatively easy to defeat bootloader protection.

HTC learned from this. They knew that a system as vulnerable as that was a fairly easy target for those that wanted to do harm. Their engineering choices for the next series of devices was pretty much set in stone: They had to protect their phones from exploitation. Hence we see the shift to eMMC and other technologies to do just that.

How did the masses respond? Well, they didn't give a crap. It was just a miniscule subset of buyers of the new Evo 3D that started *****ing and whining because they couldn't easily bypass their enhanced protection.

After a rather ugly spat of "unlock or we walk" campaigning on their Facebook wall, they promised to unlock the bootloader. A promise I am confident they will keep, if on their terms.

So that we don't lose perspective here, understand that this was a response to a VERY SMALL (albeit vocal) fraction of people that have already purchased or will eventually purchase the phone.

To rephrase: The vast majority of people that buy this phone will never even consider running anything besides what HTC officially releases as an OTA update. It won't even occur to them to do otherwise.

The current stock ROM is not perfect by any means. But then again, when has it ever been that an initial release has been perfect?

Over the course of the next few months, HTC will hopefully work out the majority of the issues (and I am confident that they will, at least from the perspective of the regular user) and, quite frankly, that SHOULD be their focus.

Cue the whining facebook posters, threatening to return their device if HTC does not make unlocking the bootloader their top priority. Hate to break it to you, but they won't, and shouldn't, do that.

You know what? I really hope you return your phones if you don't get what you want. I hope you pout and stomp your feet in the process and bahave like some self-entitled jackass as well. This isn't just about you. It's about the entire customer base, and most of them just hope you will shut the **** up. To be honest, I am one of them.

When HTC does the smart thing, and unlocks the bootloader when they are as certain as they can be that doing so won't endanger the folks that won't take advantage of it in the first place, I'll get my AOSP, and my overclocked CPU, and my tasker and my titanium backup and all the other cool things that come with a rooted phone. And I will get them when having them doesn't put everyone else at risk.

They have a lot of bugs to fix. Some of them are quite annoying. Some of them (re: temproot) are flat out dangerous.

As much as I love and support the people putting countless hours into the root process (and I am actually wondering who gets there first, HTC or the devs) given what I have seen in the dev threads, I am leaning more and more towards waiting to see what HTC comes up with, then proceeding from there. They might not admit it, but I bet the devs are secretly doing the same.

Chill out, good things are coming :)