Rooted and Loving It

I just rooted my phone last week. This means that I risked permanently breaking my phone, called bricking, in order to install my own choice of operating system (rom in this case) and software. After long deliberation and research I selected Cyanogen because of it's large following of over a quarter million users, a good online support community and relatively regular release cycles. I was a bit nervous about starting the process but thanks to the encouragement of a friend and a colleague I forged ahead. The first step was to overwrite the Android partition responsible for the boot loader. This step, if I understand the process correctly, enabled me to then take control of the phone during the boot process and gain root (admin) level access to the phone (hence the term "rooting"). After that, the process was a breeze. I simply obtained and installed the version of Cyanogen made for my phone. I did, however, choose the experimental version (Cyanogen 7 RC 2) because it was recently updated this month, had a better feature list, and no big bugs according to the support forums. After that, just installing the Google Apps add on was all that was required to completely restore and then surpass the functionality I previously had on my phone. After setting up the basics I was thrilled with the result.

Much of the reason for my delight is geeky; I like all of the myriad of controls you get with a rooted phone running a custom rom. It's incredible how many features are available just with the stock Cyanogen install. One surprise was that battery life has improved considerably. I used to have to charge my phone by 3pm but now it goes from 7am to 11pm at night with moderate usage. This improvement becomes all the more impressive in light of the speed increases made possible by having a rooted device. Much of this, I believe, is due to overclocking the CPU from 550mHz to 800mHz (a ~30% improvement!). All in all, I feel like I have a new phone which helps me be content with what I have. Moving forward, there are other benefits I see from rooting your phone. It frees the user from the whim of the carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint) who take Google's near perfect operating system and put on their own apps and crapware on which take up space and processing time; slowing our phones down. For example, phones like the popular HTC Incredible comes packed with about a dozen applications of questionable to negative value to the user which can't be removed and, to make it worse, are many times running in the background. Being able to root my phone is something I'm beginning to appreciate more and more. The ability to do this on the Android platform is one of the reasons I'll likely be sticking with the Android platform rather than switching to an iPhone this summer when I'm up for an upgrade. How about you? Have you rooted your phone and if so what was your experience?