HTC One M8 hits the rooted ground running
Thinking of jumping off the EVO bandwagon and heading over to HTC’s newest flagship the HTC One M8, but you are wondering how it handles in the root world?
Two days after the release to the general public, there are:
- M8 built TWRP for recovery
- HTC One M8 Toolkit (unlock, root, backup, recovery downloader) (Windows)
- Android Revolution HD 2.2 ROM (we covered them way back in 2011 on the EVO 3D)
- MaximusHD ROM
- A dedicated forum on XDA
Along with a Google Play Edition (pure Android) in the works, which means CyanogenMod/AOSP crowd.
So it’s got a pretty decent start already. The M8 doesn’t appear to have beaten the EVO 4G LTE in terms of first development, as the EVO 4G LTE had a ROM available before the phone was released. But then again that was a special case, as there was another phone with the same basic hardware setup.
It’s a good start, I’m actually pretty interested to see what comes out of this even though I’ve been a pretty staunch critic of HTC this is the first phone they’ve released since the EVO that is on my radar as a potential upgrade (liked the HTC One, couldn’t get one because my wife had one). There doesn’t appear to be any S-OFF exploit available yet, but it also doesn’t seem as if there’s a burning need like there was with the EVO line … at least not at the moment. I don’t think we required S-OFF on the 3D until the later firmware revisions that made most AOSP ROMs impossible.
It will be interesting to see how this phone fares in the development world – will HTC continue releasing kernel source codes months after it would have been useful, or will it actually do something to aid in development and release it when the firmware updates are released since it’s selling a developer edition?
Time will tell.
