Bricked Phone

[marefin]

What does it mean when your phone is "bricked"? Is it pretty much unusable forever or do you just have to do a factory reset on it to get it in an usable condition?

 

[ThreeDog]

bricked basically means that the boot area is destroyed and the phone no longer boots up. aka it's no longer a usable phone but a brick.

 

[denshvalaunt]

Are you trying to tell us that you bricked your phone?

 

[takeshi]

What does it mean when your phone is "bricked"?

It means "as useful as a brick". It's a permanent condition but n00bs have been misusing and diluting the term to mean just about any (recoverable) problem that they happen to run into.

 

[marefin]

Are you trying to tell us that you bricked your phone?

No I haven't bricked my phone. Haven't attempted rooting it yet. I've jailbroken my old iPhone plenty of times, is rooting an Android similar to that at all?

 

[bluenova]

No I haven't bricked my phone. Haven't attempted rooting it yet. I've jailbroken my old iPhone plenty of times, is rooting an Android similar to that at all?

Not really, although it will allow you to do some things that you can do with a jailbroken iPhone.

To root is basically to gain write access to the file system. Some people like this to modify files themselves others like it because it means they can run apps that need to modify files. A classic example is Titanium Backup which requires root and is the only full backup system for Android.

A lot of people confuse rooting with installing a custom ROM/recovery partition but this is something entirely different. The reason why a lot of people confuse it is because most custom ROMs come pre-rooted.

btw, the chances of bricking your phone whilst rooting is zero and the chances of bricking it whilst installing a custom ROM/recovery partition are minimal.
The time to be very careful is when updating the radio because if this gets interupted or the wrong radio is loaded it will brick your phone. This is 99.9% the reason for people to have bricked their phone.

 

[marefin]

The time to be very careful is when updating the radio because if this gets interupted or the wrong radio is loaded it will brick your phone. This is 99.9% the reason for people to have bricked their phone.

Thank you for the information. But what do you mean by updating the radio? I'm not even sure how to use the FM radio on my phone (Captivate) or am I confusing the term radio with something else? I'm very new to the Android world and still learning all the bits and pieces.

 

[damewolf13]

No, it is not the same as the fm radio app on your phone.
Basically ALL cell phones are very fancy transistor radios, and when you root your phone, or update, if something goes haywire with the radio portion of your phone, your entire phone will become bricked, which is to say totally powerless/dead.

 

[marefin]

So how can I prevent messing around with the radio? Does rooting automatically mess with the radio on the phone?