[Sony Xperia XZ2 Questions & Answers] xarinatan:
I love the hardware, I've had pretty much every 3rd xperia Z compact they ever released (every 2 years or so, when my old one lost its waterproofness and started falling apart), but every year they've gotten more cocky with their DRM, and this time it outright bricks the camera-- and also I just found even Emma (Xperia Flashtool) can't restore the DRM and bootloader this time around, even though that's I could swear that's what I used to use it for on my older phones..

But to be fair, I haven't used it in ages, because right now I'm still using my Z5 compact since that one is actually functional even while rooted, and I even have my much older Z1 compact rocking the latest lineage because people are still keeping that thing up to date, and it's an absolute bliss of a phone compared to just about anything out there that reaches that level of openness as sony was all about opensource in the early Z days, but right now the external case is all that's keeping it from falling apart, and my Z5 compact's bt/wifi/LTE keep dying and the screen has water damage (after the abuse its had I can forgive it that), so I was really looking forward to a fancy new replacement with all the promised features, and I was really looking forward to trying to compile together a personal little AOSP with just the things I need, but the XZ2 compact isn't anything like the Z5 compact, let alone the Z1 compact freedom-wise; right now the fancy high resolution high speed camera is still as useful as a black preview and bright greenscreen green photos and recordings, and Sony's Emma Flashtool is now even less useful than the opensource Flashtool.

It angers me so much, enough to poke a lawyer about it so I just might; you sell a device for over halfway a thousand euros, have the ****ing nuts to put not only ads (and spyware that's been to court) on it but also make sure the end user can't just remove them normally (how much did they pay you for that?), and then just go full chrome huffing mad and actually still run that old developer.sonymobile.com website with the same line by line instructions how to unlock your bootloader and the same 'we wub opensos so much <3,3,33' propaganda, but you actually permanently cripple the expensive device you just sold your customer as soon as they unlock the bootloader to the point it doesn't even have the promised features anymore at all ever, until the opensource community that you claim to love so much goes on to put all the effort they can into getting around that filthy corporate DRM so the device actually works as promised, DRM that sony keeps spending resources on so the opensource community has to spend more resources again to get around it.. What's the opensource program worth these days anyway? As far as I know (and I could always be wrong) all that's left of it is the opensource dumps of the older versions of the ROMs, which don't contain anything that helps with the DRM problems, and sony is actually just releasing these because they're required to by law, as Android is based on Linux and Linux is GPL software, so it's not just niceties that they put that basic romdump there.

so.. I'm sorry, but even with the DRM fix that pisses me off more than enough that I would spend over double the money I spent on the phone on giving Sony a well deserved punch in the face. Aren't we supposed to be on the same side? From the moment I gave you 500+ euros as a customer?? Argh it's all so ****ing backwards it's mindblowing, but most people I speak to about it just shrug it off like "Yea we all get boned up the ass by big ass companies that have the money to have a legion of lawyers on constant standby so whatcha gunna do about it", and so the world spins backwards and fire consumes everything and water floods the cities because nobody actually went forward and did something about it "cuz it's just the way it is".

I think I might ask EFF what they think about this, it'd be my best throw at legal action as average low class joe.