The undisputed leader of all sales from all carriers that offers the iPhone is the iPhone 4S for last two months of 2011. Who would have thought otherwise?  More interesting and telling is the struggle for second place. The Samsung Galaxy S II looks like the leader for the second spot, except for Verizon where Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus took the position in December 2011, while in November 2011 it was Motorola’s Droid RAZR as Verizon’s second big selling phone.

T-Mobile doesn’t offer the iPhone 4S, so their best selling phone is the Samsung Galaxy S II. But it’s easy to imagine that if they could cater iPhones to their customers, the iPhone 4S would have been the leader with T-Mobile, too.

Another interesting feature in these trends is the fall of original iPhone 4 popularity which can be seen on a full span of six months research. Can Samsung’s Galaxy S II overtake iPhones one day? I don’t think so. Samsung is still the fourth in the race for the best vendor prize,  after Apple, HTC, and Motorola. Even if Samsung is on the rise now, who knows how much time it will take them to beat HTC? And if it will be quite rather long wait, then there will be the iPhone 5 available by then which will start a totally different game.

Carriers which are piggybacking on “big guys” bandwidth didn’t make it into this report. But volumes of their sales of handhelds most probably cannot really change the picture.

The post Top Selling Phones of 2011: iPhone 4S Leads The Way appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

We have heard your voice and starting now, we will allow our bootloader to be unlocked for 2011 models going forward. We plan on releasing the updates that will allow you to unlock your bootloader in the coming months, please keep an eye on this website for more details on which devices will be adding this feature. We are extremely pleased to see the energy and enthusiasm from our fans and loyal customers, and we are excited to see what you are capable of. HTC eagerly anticipates your innovations.

The not so good news is that this step undertaken by HTC is followed by a flurry of caveats and disclaimers of any HTC responsibility for the customers unlocking actions. Even if that brave customer uses an official unlocking tool designed by HTC themselves. Then, the unlocker will work first for the HTC Wildfire S, Wildfire, Salsa, Merge, and Desire brands that account for 22 models. Now, by PDADB data base reports, HTC has more than 500 phones, and it remains to be seen how many of them locked and how many will be presented with an unlocker tool in good time.

Then, the FOTA option for deploying unlocker tool is quite dubious at best: if its designed as FOTA with unlocker, it certainly much safer to have a FOTA upgrade option with factory unlocked bootloader.

Even if the HTC unlocker tool is already available as a separate download, there are some problems with deploying it over what hackers did to their HTC devices already, that is, without HTC help.

But don’t get me wrong, the movement to unlock their devices’ bootloaders widens across manufacturers, and it’s a very good thing. We need to shout this news out to Motorola for the RAZR and Barnes & Noble for the NOOK Tablet.

The post HTC Dev Team Unlocks Bootloaders On Their 2011 Phones appeared first on Mobile Magazine.