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Posts: 1,336 | Thanked: 3,932 times | Joined on Jul 2010 @ Brittany, France
#1875
Originally Posted by British View Post
Well yes, but no.

The warranty is indeed 2 years, if you don't tamper with your device physically (which makes perfect sense) AND if you only use Android.



While I understand why it is so, that's also quite a bummer.

It also brings another question for all the privacy-haters that fancy Google so much: the FAQ says "it must be running Android", yet it doesn't state it should be the Android version the Pro1 will be shipped with.
Since F(x)tec is publicly advocating their open bootloader, I suppose it's all very possible to use another "flavor" of Android... but will it void the warranty as well ?
If so, they should come clean and state it on the product page:



instead of the bland and inaccurate



Now about the "support" part... they do say that alternate OSes are to be supported, but then again, as I just pinpointed, it's the hardware (Pro1) that supports the OSes (or the other way around, if you prefer that), since the company (F(x)tec) doesn't (since the warranty is lost).

I know, semantics.

That won't prevent me from getting it and installing anything but Android (so the classical third-grade answer "if you're not happy with it, no one is forcing you/go elsewhere" we've been getting of late is still irrelevant), but as I said, that's still a bummer.
I don't know if that is real since I got it from the review video that was shared after the first event in Germany, but it was said that unlocking the bootloader does not void the warranty, just that the device has to be running Android to be covered by the warranty.

If confirmed, this tells us two things: (1) we are free to try other OSes, and this complies with the willingness of F(x)tec to support other OSes although they cannot cover software issues with the warranty, for very understandable reasons; (2) if we can put Android back before sending it for service, then it means the issue we had in the first place was not a brick or related to the OS we were running, which puts F(x)tec in a much better situation to deal with the broken device. This all seems perfectly reasonable to me, and actually much more flexible than warranties by other companies, even Nokia in the N900/N9 times.

Usually people who tinker with their device to the point that they unlock the bootloader and install hacky community-developed OSes are fully aware that they are compromising their right to pull the warranty string later. In this case, they might still be able to do so, which is already a pretty significant difference favoring users compared to other companies.

(Sorry for the three distinct messages, I replied as I read the new pages, and felt a single wall-of-text message would be worse.)
 

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