What does rooting your device mean excatly?

[AndriodPurple]

And what are the beinfits of it?

 

[Thom]

What device (e.g., Droid Bionic) and what carrier (e.g., Verizon) are you using?

The best place to get that discussion going is the All-Thing-Root subforum of the forum dedicated to your device and carrier.

... Thom

 

[argedion]

Read this here to find out what it means

Best Practices when rooted

You've went and rooted now what?

 

[Stuntman]

The reason I rooted my phone is so that I can get it to automatically switch my keyboard to SwiftKey when in landscape orientation and automatically switch to Swype when in portrait orientation. You cannot do this if your phone is not rooted.

 

[argedion]

It also means freedom. Getting rid of bloatware. It means making your device yours.

 

[bluebayou]

Rooting means basically stripping away your phone's "custom software" and going back to vanilla & even more freedom than that. It allows you to customize absolutely nearly all aspects of your phone, install your own software on it, run your own programs, fully customize its looks etc.

Basically lets you hack into your phone's Linux kernel.