The last few days have seen a flurry of activity regarding the T-Mobile G2 and the revelation that the phone itself, won’t stay “rooted.” As it turns out, as discovered by the experts at XDA Forums, the phone will self-repair per a built-in lock that ensures the handset will find itself back to a stock state.

Now of course, we have to play devils advocate for a second and say that while hacking and rooting and all that good stuff is perfectly legal, T-Mobile and HTC have a right to protect their property. It’s possible that those unfamiliar with the tenants of rooting can find themselves in a position where they need to take their phones to a T-Mobile retail store and present it to a befuddled sales rep who is clueless to help. This will just aggravate everyone involved making for a bad customer experience that will ultimately get blamed on T-Mobile and leave the customer with a bad taste in their mouth.

On the flip side, the entire concept of Android is supposed to be open, it’s a term championed by Android proponents everywhere. Customization is one of the major selling points of Android and the ability to root, opens up further possibilities with the Android platform to go even further on the customization level. There is no way this ends well.

With all that in mind though, T-Mobile has released a statement:

As pioneers in Android-powered mobile devices, T-Mobile and HTC strive to support innovation.  The T-Mobile G2 is a powerful and highly customizable Android-powered smartphone, which customers can personalize and make their own, from the look of their home screen to adding their favorite applications and more.

The HTC software implementation on the G2 stores some components in read-only memory as a security measure to prevent key operating system software from becoming corrupted and rendering the device inoperable. There is a small subset of highly technical users who may want to modify and re-engineer their devices at the code level, known as “rooting,” but a side effect of HTC’s security measure is that these modifications are temporary and cannot be saved to permanent memory.  As a result the original code is restored.

T-Mobile