Last August, HTC said all its phones going forward would be released with an unlocked bootloader. It also promised to unlock bootloaders for some older models as well. We thought the Taiwanese company meant the Incredible 2 or other recent phones released in the last year or so. Leave it to HTC to surprise us all with a bootloader unlocking tool that works on phones as old as the HTC Hero.
A post on HTC’s Google+ account confirms that the HTC Hero, Legend, Droid Eris, myTouch 3G, and myTouch 4G are now supported by this utility. You can grab the unlocking tool and instructions from HTC’s dev site. Just select “Unlock Bootloader”, choose your phone and follow the directions. This unlock is basically a nice gesture from HTC. Once you unlock the bootloader, you can install custom ROMs, but active development on handsets that are two to three-years-old is likely minimal.