Quote:
Originally Posted by frankieGom
I'm with davidfor (and Kobo) on this one and prefer Kobe use their scarce resources to some other uses than making sure the hackers populating these forums (of which I am one example) cannot brick their devices.
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Maybe I haven't been clear.
I don't care about hackers breaking their devices. By definition, this activity is the deliberate manipulation of the firmware. If you break that seal that says 'breaking seal will void warranty', then you are on your own.
The theoretical scenario in this case is that someone, who wanted to simply read an ebook that was on their SD card without having the device reboot every time it came out of sleep, did an activity that is well know to have worked in the past (as recently as 2 weeks ago) and discovered that Kobo had pulled the rug out from under them.
Kobo is producing
consumer electronics devices. And have allowed users access to a drive on that device. That drive contains files that the device needs to operate. As such, the device should be able to properly handle any activity that happens on that drive.
Face it, normal none technical people are moving things on and off their Kobo's. What happens if they accidentally delete all of the files? What happens if their computer has a problem and corrupts the drive?
Putting a check in to ensure that the update firmware is for the correct device is a basic check. Especially if there is any possibility that the wrong firmware can be loaded, and this possibility clearly exists (do you really completely trust Kobo not to make mistakes in the Desktop app?).
Over the past year, Kobo users have been trained that they can manually load firmware updates. We were warned that after 2.1.4 future firmware may be targetted to specific devices and may be 'incompatible' with the non-targetted devices in the future. There is a fairly large difference between 'incompatible' and 'will render useless'. 2.1.5 came out without any announcement, and specifically without an announcement that the firmware was targetted to specific devices and that it would break the Glo.
Consider two facts, the first of which is that 'incompatible' is not a very strong word or warning. In fact, I found that the 2.0.0a official release was incompatible with my Australian Touch. The second fact is that 2.1.5 is an emergency bug fix release and the clear assumption was that it was just 2.1.4 with the major bug fixed, not that it was the first of these future releases. In fact, while one can make the argument that while it was technically a future release and covered by the warning, in my mind I was expecting the next feature release (now 2.1.6? 2.2.0?) to be the one that we had to be careful of.
In fact, 2.1.5 was not really a 'release' in that Kobo did not update the release notes, and the 2.1.4 release notes are displayed on the device when you update to the 2.1.5 firmware. Nor was 2.1.5 announced here on MR, which seems to be the place for Kobo to announce new releases.
The final point is that the paperclip reset seems to have moved from a factory reset to a basic reset in the Glo. It should have remained the factory reset, so that no matter what happens to the device, you can always get it back to a working state without having to delve into Linux command lines. It wasn't so very long ago that Kobo's own official release (2.0.0a, the last release in fact) caused many people to have to resort to the paperclip factory reset because the firmware failed to properly update and bricked the devices.