It’s no surprise that the HTC One X is currently one of the hottest smartphones. With a decent design and top-end specs we thought this would fly off the shelves and indeed it has. However those in the U.S. who purchased the HTC One X on AT&T were shocked when they found out that it had been released there with an unlockable bootloader. The good news today for some of you is that an unofficial bootloader unlock is now available.

Given HTC’s recent position regarding bootloaders and how the company stated its commitment to launching phones with unlockable bootloaders, plenty of those who purchased the AT&T variant were pretty dismayed to hear that the bootloader was locked. Especially considering that the international version of the HTC One X was released with an unlockable bootloader. The only reason that HTC gave for the different stance with the AT&T version was “restrictions” that prevented them, so most likely there was some resistance to this from AT&T. However when we first heard of this situation we did say that we thought hackers would be on to it in no time and that’s exactly what has happened.

News of the unofficial unlock becoming available comes to us from Droid Matters and comes courtesy of XDA Developers. One of their users, Grankin01 has managed to unlock the bootloader by fooling the HTC-Dev’s unlock tool into believing that the AT&T variant of the HTC One X was in fact a Rogers’ HTC One XL. This will be good news for the many of you who can’t wait to get tinkering and enjoy the use of custom ROMs and more. As usual though we cannot recommend that users try this out and there are risks that come with attempting to unlock your bootloader. However we do know that many of our readers will be itching to get to work on it.

You can find full instructions for the unofficial bootloader unlock at XDA here but please remember the usual advice to back up all of your personal data before you begin. There are three requirements to consider as well. You need to have a rooted device, ADB plus some knowledge of using it, and also a hex editor such as HxD. As we already stated we cannot take responsibility if anything goes wrong but we’d be interested to hear from readers who try it out.

Will you now be attempting to unlock the bootloader on your AT&T HTC One X? Let us know if everything went smoothly or not by leaving us your comments.