Why root / worry about boot loaders

[vzwtek]

All 3,247 of the Droid1 custom roms run better? I bet approximately 0 of them run better than FRG01B

I dont know humpa, lets see the benchmarks to telll!!!

lol ... I'm done kidding around. Gotta work. I really liked the custom rom's on the Droid1 too. I tried 42 of them, and liked pretty much all of them.
... the sheer number of them was/is a little over the top though.

Lol, I know, there are too many to count, hopefully they can fix the locked bootloader soon for the droid X!!! That way we could see a few thousand, woohoo!!!

 

[jntdroid]

You can root alone and not mess with flashing any kernels or custom ROMS - the kernels and ROMS are typically what cause any problems, not rooting itself - rooting is simply gaining access to parts of the OS you couldn't get to before, in so many terms. There are some cool apps that only work with root.

 

[richjacksonkc]

Rooting is the same thing as jail breaking. You can't get the really cool apps without being rooted, and besides all the cool kids are doing it.

I am rooting my Droid X *AND* jumping off a bridge at the same time... who will join me? everyone is doing it....


-Cool Kid

 

[richjacksonkc]

..but on the the real ZamSlam, I'm with you... I flashed my Droid 1 to death (not literally that thing is a beast).. but I'm waiting a bit on my Droid X.. not b/c I'm scared, I'm just not going to hassle with it until it's a little more advantageous.. I've been a guinea pig since November for the D1.. I'll wait until the roms/hacks are more polished this time.. or until I REALLY need access to root for some reason..

 

[aw3sk3r]

Ok, here's a quick question: "Simply stated, what is the Droid X?"

If you answered "a phone", then rooting isn't really that big a deal. You can work around carrier restrictions and get some more life out of your phone, but that's about it.

Personally, I see a device with a 1 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, a dedicated graphics card, 8 GB of internal storage, a USB host, and network connectivity. That's a general purpose computer. Throw in its mobility and a sensor package that basically makes it a tricorder and you have a very interesting device.

As perceptions differ, so do expectations. Yesterday I wanted to type up a SOAP note, but all of the available desktop computers were in use. Seeing a computer in the palm of my hand, I got the idea that I could just use a USB keyboard with the USB OTG port and type my future notes that way. Oops, Motorola never thought to enable USB OTG, install keyboard drivers, or add anything to the GUI to do that. With root (or perhaps a custom kernel, Linux handles hardware a bit weird IMHO), I can fix that. Earlier this week I tried playing a simple Xvid encoded video in a Matroska container, only to find that the proper codecs (agh... libraries, again with Linux) weren't installed. On the first day I got my phone I installed Epocrates only to find that it needed an older version of libwebcore.so, which, without root, I couldn't install. (Fortunately the update fixed this.)

The usefulness of a general purpose computing device shouldn't be lost on anyone who didn't buy a tool just to read this forum. Verizon doesn't want to sell them since then they'd become a dumb data carrier, could no longer justify nickel and diming people on add-on services, and could only compete with other carriers on throughput, latency, and price. Motorola doesn't want to sell them because they'd saturate their market in no time, since people wouldn't need multiple specialized devices when a single device would suffice. (Amusingly, they do love to take advantage of general purpose open source software so they don't have to develop everything from scratch for every device.) Google would love for this to happen since then you could do a Google search from your toaster, hence the push for openness from them. In short, empowering the consumer in a small way, through root, is the foot in the door for creating a buyer's market that's less favorable to Verizon and Motorola.

Oops, that's starting to get into philosophy and hypotheticals. Suffice to say, if you see the potential of your device then you try to break the artificial limitations that prevent you from realizing it.

Good reply and well said!

 

[mgf]

..but on the the real ZamSlam, I'm with you... I flashed my Droid 1 to death (not literally that thing is a beast).. but I'm waiting a bit on my Droid X.. not b/c I'm scared, I'm just not going to hassle with it until it's a little more advantageous.. I've been a guinea pig since November for the D1.. I'll wait until the roms/hacks are more polished this time.. or until I REALLY need access to root for some reason..

i rooted just to have it. You never know when u might need to do something that requires root.like say your on a road trip and you need to use your laptop but don't feel like pay verizon $20, you can just use the wireless tether app. And i got rid of the ugly white status bar. And now i have root, so i don't have to go through the hassel when the custom rims start rolling out.

 

[Breakmyfootoff]

There's several well thought out and very technical replies here on what the benefits of rooting are. Mine is very simple though lol, THEMES! Overclocking could be fun, although I dont feel it's really necessary with this phone, and I'm not concerned with the wifi tether either, just give me my themes! The stock menus/icons/notifications are sooooo bland and boring on the stock Android UI. I can even do without the ROMs as long as we get a full backup method so we can have themes.