Motorola Photon 4G :: 2.3.5 *CAN'T* Be Updated?

(Disclaimer: what follows is purely speculative, but based upon years of experience with embedded software development)Convenient, isn't it, that the phones Motorola has eternally condemned to 2.3.5 are EXACTLY the same phones that got their bootloaders permalocked by Motorola a couple of months ago? could be cynical and speculate that Motorola deliberately locked them down to be mean and evil, but there's a far more obvious explanation: Motorola screwed up the 2.3.5 bootloader they pushed to the Atrix, Electrify, and Photon bigtime, and painted themselves into a corner with a bug that makes some/many/most/all Photons with the 2.3.5 bootloader unable to ever be (safely?) reflashed again without JTAG assistance.

Bootloaders are temperamental beasts. By now, it's not a *huge* secret how to write a robust bootloader that makes it almost impossible to truly brick a phone in a way that can't be progressively repaired through an immutable fallback bootloader (even if it's beyond the skill of typical end users). Unfortunately, as Motorola is probably learning the hard way right about now, it's next to impossible to write a robustly locked-down bootloader with "foolproof" security that fails-deny AND simultaneously leave yourself a "plan B" just in case that bootloader ends up with some bug that leaves it unable to apply future updates.

My guess is that Motorola had precisely that nightmare scenario happen -- lots of phones that are now locked down harder than even Motorola intended, and can no longer be reflashed. Motorola have either NO 'plan B' (and are now in a position of having to hack their own bootloader, without doing it in a way that would reveal its secrets to everyone at XDA with a decompiler), or they have a 'plan B' whose use would reveal a backdoor that everyone ELSE could use to circumvent the protected bootloader's security, too.If they did something *really* stupid, like use the same encryption key for all of their phones (say, by wrapping it into a security chip that got mass-produced and used for several generations of phones), it might even make it possible to use the same technique on Motorola's OTHER phones as well.