I'd purchased this phone off of Craigslist when the model was very recently released, and I've put in a lot of hours by now into rooting the phone, learning more than I'd ever hoped along the way about how phones work, and about how the big PCS providers try to lock the phones to their own networks.
I ended up with a Verizon model because I wanted the latest and best phone from HTC, and an unlocked phone would've cost two-hundred dollars more. It was all I could find on Craigslist. At the time I got it, it turned out that none of the local cell phone shops knew how to unlock it, and in fact they balked at the notion of doing so, or warned that it would be illegal (which, in my case as a purchaser of the phone second-hand, was not true). Thus, as a subscriber of Mobi PCS who generally loathes the national carriers, it fell upon me to figure out how to break Verizon's hold on my phone.
Fortunately for me, there is a big community of Android rooters who had already developed a solution. I will spare you the gory details of the challenges of both the learning curve I had to climb and the convoluted and dodgy process of breaking Verizon's shackles on this device, except to say that it was only really so difficult because the PCS providers have zero respect fot their customers—they think of them as chattel—and so they engineer very complicated measures against getting the phone to work on other networks. It's for this kind of reason (and also because I have been into phone phreaking since I was a shorty) that I was a Mobi PCS subscriber in the first place: all telecom companies are bad, but the less big, the less bad they can be, to some extent.
The rooting took a week of intense effort and frustration. Part of this was due to Mobi's poor customer service. They simply did not have the technical know-how that was necessary to get my phone (or specifically, its internal radio) to be recognized by their system. Mobi had claimed to have been able to use any unlocked Droid on their network, but it wasn't true for whatever reason, and because of this unforseeable turn of events, I ate the considerable cost of this phone—it would've been free with a contract had I signed up for T-Mobile from the start. The T-Mobile shop got my phone into the system in ten minutes flat. C'est la vie.
| BREAKIN' THE LAW |
Things worked so-so for the last several months. I would have to reboot a few times a day because of a bug in VenomOS that caused the radio to periodically lose its connection to the mobile network. Somehow this was more tolerable than rooting the phone again, even with a much better understanding of the gotchas, the phone unlocked, and custom bootloaders and recovery partitions already installed.
I only finally decided it was time to upgrade because the phone appeared not to connect to the USB debugger. This turned out to be a problem with the cable I was using: something as seemingly run-of-the-mill and interchangeable as USB cables can cause tricky problems with phones. This time, to upgrade, I had to wipe everything off of the phone, flash the stock Verizon ROM, download the over-the-air updates to the phone's firmware, then wipe it again and install VenomOS. This time it took a night instead of a week or more.
All this for what? For a dubious sense of freedom? Earlier, I considered the possibility of going without mobile services and using VoIP and WiFi instead, but I realized it's practically impossible to do without SMS texting. So, I'm still bound to T-Mobile a.k.a. "The Man". At least it feels good to be in control of the hardware I bought and own. It's also been edifying to learn about the way these phones work. Of course, Venom also has numerous fun features and none of the bloat of the stock OS.
Supposedly this more recent version of VenomOS will play nice with T-Mobile.
*Edit:* But as it turns out, the fucking thing still drops off the network at random times. Up next: I'll be installing Cyanogenmod and seeing if that's progressed since I tried it in Spring.
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