Sony Ericsson has been talking about leaving their bootloaders unlocked for a while now. Sony Ericsson was one of the first companies to announce leaving their bootloaders unlocked on their devices. They even have instructions on their website showing users how to unlock bootloaders. When it was first brought to our attention they were going to unlock bootloaders we were excited seeing as the other competition Motorola and HTC had not mentioned this at all. Of course now HTC has announced their bootloaders will no longer be locked.
Sony Ericsson also went on to say that their handsets, even when unlocked, would continue to receive regular firmware/software updates from Sony Ericsson whenever they were made available. Under one condition. The device had to be running the stock Sony Ericsson software.
Well, it looks like SE may be doing a little backpedaling adding new stipulations to their previous stance. They are now saying that once the bootloader is unlocked, you will NOT be receiving regular firmware updates from Sony Ericsson. While this sounds like a bad move, they actually have a pretty good reason for doing so. Sony Ericsson explained that because they have no way of knowing what software a user will install on their device, it makes it nearly impossible for them to give their customers 100% certainty that an update will be compatible. That actually makes perfect sense.
The issues still lay in the fact that while you will soon be able to install custom ROM’s on your Sony Ericsson phone with an unlocked bootloader but currently have no way or restoring your phone back to a stock state. This being said I have faith in the Android Community to come up with a Flash for these phones even though Nexus One users may argue that fact.