Price drop to $199.99 on-contract is in the pipeline for the HTC Rezound come January 9th?

Venerable smartphone maker HTC has seen its fair share of great times in the industry, but very recently, the competition has proven to be a taxing thing for the Taiwanese based company. At this point, it’s difficult to say how well or often consumers are scooping up its products, but to stir things up, it seems that they might be getting a boost from its Verizon portfolio.

When you look at the premium priced Verizon smartphones, the Motorola DROID RAZR, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and HTC Rezound all sit atop at the higher-than-normal price of $299.99 with a 2-year contract. In this kind of economy, $300 for any smartphone is really rough, so in order to spur sales, we normally see price reductions.

Price drop to $199.99 on-contract is in the pipeline for the HTC Rezound come January 9th?
One of our tipsters managed to send us some information that indicates a price drop coming to the HTC Rezound. From the looks of it, starting on January 9th, Big Red will be reducing the price of the Rezound by $100 – bringing its total tally to $199.99 with a 2-year agreement. Furthermore, it looks like the HTC Rhyme is also seeing a slight cut in price to $149.99 starting on the same date.

Obviously, some people are going to be happy with the expected price cuts, but it’s still anyone’s guess if it’ll make an impact in the long run. Time will surely tell in the long run.

Thanks to our anonymous tipster!

HTC expands list of phones with unlocked bootloader option

HTC recently said that that work was continuing on expanding the list of older models that can have the bootloader unlocked. The Taiwan based manufacturer added six more phones to its list of handsets that now have support for an unlocked bootloader and tweeted the news to a grateful public. The phones added are the HTC Wildfire, HTC Wildfire S, HTC Salsa, HTC Merge, HTC Desire and the HTC Status. All HTC models produced after September, 2011 come with an unlocked bootloader and HTC continues to work on allowing the process to become supported on older phones.

For those unfamiliar with a bootloader, it is a program that controls which applications will run when you boot up your phone. To keep the process of powering on your device the same each time, and to keep out malicious software, the bootloader is usually locked by the manufacturer. But with the large number of Android users who want to add custom software on their phone, some manufacturers have decided to allow for an unlocked bootloader on newer models and are offering tools to unlock older handsets. Of course, we should let you know that if you turn your phone into a brick once the bootloader is unlocked, your warranty becomes useless.

If you have one of the HTC devices with a bootloader that can be unlocked, or you are unsure if your model is included, head over to htc.dev/bootloader. From that page, you will be able to view a list of all HTC models that can support the unlocking process and you can start the procedure. If your HTC phone is not on the list, you might want to try Xda's HTC Super Tool v3 which, as we recently reported, is theoretically able to unlock the bootloader on all HTC phones.