Shockingly, Verizon has (allegedly) once again prevailed upon Samsung to lock the bootloaders of its latest flagship phone for Big Red, the Galaxy Note 2. Sarcasm aside, it's hardly surprising that Verizon has made this decision again, though Big Red's Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note 2 are now the only Samsung phones on any carrier that have locked bootloaders. Readers of Android development forums such as Rootzwiki obviously take issue with this policy, and our numbers have grown large enough to motivate Samsung to announce a Developer Edition of the Galaxy S III, and perhaps they will for the Galaxy Note 2 as well (one can only hope).

Of course, any Developer Edition with unlocked bootloaders will likely have to be bought at full retail as the one for the Galaxy S III will (whenever it gets officially released). Big Red customers still enjoying grandfathered unlimited data, of course, would have to pay full retail anyway in order to keep those costly data caps at bay. However, those of you who use Verizon's tiered data plans would likely prefer the subsidized version, in which case you would have to wait for our elite developers to unlock the bootloaders (after all, it's been done before).

Verizon justified this vile (at least to the root community) policy to the FCC earlier this year, claiming that locking the bootloaders minimizes potential dangers that unlocked, rooted devices pose to the network. No evidence has ever been presented to justify this absurd claim even though there are thousands of unlocked and rooted devices already on its network, such as the Galaxy Nexus, the Samsung Fascinate and the original Motorola Droid.

The real reason for Verizon's lockdown policy is likely to prevent the removal of the many revenue-generating bloatware apps that Verizon loves to bundle with its handsets. To be fair, some of the apps are actually very compelling. For example, I use NFL Mobile on my unlocked Galaxy Nexus to watch live NFL streaming video with a paid subscription because I cut my cable TV service at home. However, many of Verizon's apps seem to be there just to hog memory and cpu resources while generating more revenue for the carrier.