I suppose Sony executives have this funny grin on their faces that shout, “Problem?” whenever someone with a Sony smartphone which carries an unlocked bootloader walks into their service centers to perform a hardware repair of sorts. This is because there is a growing number of owners who claim that Sony Mobile turns away the repair of handsets that have hardware issues including the yellow-tint display issue, simply because their bootloader has been unlocked. Sony Mobile deems such handsets to have been illegally unlocked, affecting so far folks who have sent their smartphones to UK and Dutch Sony Mobile repair centres.
If you re-lock the bootloader prior to sending it in will not make too much of a difference, as the engineers over at Sony Mobile will most probably be able to tell that the DRM keys have been removed before. The bone of contention is this – the warning issued by Sony Mobile to folks before performing an unlocking process via the official channels reads like this, “Please note that you may void the warranty of your phone and/or any warranty from your operator if you unlock the boot loader.”
‘May’ void the warranty? Isn’t that really ambiguous at the very least? Hopefully things will pan out for the better in due time.
Filed in . Read more about Bootloader, Sony and Unlocked.