I'm new to the thought of rooting/unlocking my phone. In talking with Verizon I'm being told that if I do unlock the phone and not add programming the phone will function just fine just will open it to being more apt to getting a virus, and allow me to remove some of the extra apps that came with the phone. Also was told by Verizon that my phone will still be able to receive other the air updates to jelly bean. Anyone else heard the same by chance?
Verizon isn't normally the ones to give you good answer on anything other than what you bill is & they even get that wrong a lot, but that info is actually surprising pretty OK.
In short rooting basically just gives you administrator privileges. By doing this you'll have access to system files allowing you do things you couldn't like uninstall system apps among many other things.
Unlocking bootloader will allow you to flash any ROM you want, although there are work arounds for custom ROMs being ran on q phone with a locked bootloader it still limits what can be done & development. The fact that you can flash anything you want & that it's possible that it could be something that can damage you device is why you lose warranty if you unlock it.
The act of rooting and/or unlocking will not change how anything was working or getting OTA updates, what you do afterwards however can. Deleting or simply leaving preinstalled apps frozen will prevent installing the OTA, in these cases you can just, unfreeze, reinstall, or fast boot back to stock, or with unlocked bootloader you could just flash it.
If you're paying full retail you should just buy the dev edition even if you don't think you'll want/need to unlock the bootloader. If you never unlock it you're will he the same as the retail version with the same warranty, but if someday you find the want/need to unlock it you can.
Mine is out for delivery, my 2nd day shipping has taken 1 week(since Motorola didn't actually ship until Fri) ironically I ordered a HD dock station a couple of days after the phone & car dock with standard shipping & it's also out for deliverly. Since 2nd day shipping was free for the first order I'm not going to complain.
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