Rooting: Risk Vs. Rewards

[romeoa1a]

Yo Folks,

I've been looking at the idea of rooting my droid since the droid and never quite worked up the nerves to actually do it. Now that I got my X I think i'm just about ready to take the plunge. But before I do I want make sure that i'm well educated on the risk vs. rewards of doing so. My main two concerns are;

1. Can I destroy my phone in the process? Chances of that happening..
2. Is the process reversable without ota?
3. Will I be able to activate features such as wifi tethering without the pesky monthly sevice charge that's associated with it ?

I'm hoping for someone very knowledgable about rooting will post on this thread for less educated folks like myself. Using bullet format highly some of the quick risks vs. rewards of rooting this monster of phone. Help a brother out !

 

[schimm]

Well, we got a rooting forum here so you should look there for better answers. If you follow directions (and there are plenty of videos and step-by-steps) you're not gonna mess up your phone. Best thing for you at this point is do the research and get a clearer idea of what's involved, the software you need installed on your PC, etc. Some very cool roms out there and when you overclock with froyo, your droid pretty much is as fast as the X.

 

[Gnomesarealive]

Yo Folks,

I've been looking at the idea of rooting my droid since the droid and never quite worked up the nerves to actually do it. Now that I got my X I think i'm just about ready to take the plunge. But before I do I want make sure that i'm well educated on the risk vs. rewards of doing so. My main two concerns are;

1. Can I destroy my phone in the process? Chances of that happening..
2. Is the process reversable without ota?
3. Will I be able to activate features such as wifi tethering without the pesky monthly sevice charge that's associated with it ?

I'm hoping for someone very knowledgable about rooting will post on this thread for less educated folks like myself. Using bullet format highly some of the quick risks vs. rewards of rooting this monster of phone. Help a brother out !

1. You can render your phone unusable if you remove apps that the phone needs to run. People are working on uploading all of the stock apps so that if anyone messes it up it can be fixed.
2. I know when I had my Eris, you could just Factory Reset and it would unroot the phone. Not sure if it is the same as the X, but most Verizon employees wouldn't even know what to look for to find out if a phone was rooted or not. (I assume you're worried about warranty issues)
3. You can't use the Stock "3g Hotspot" app that comes with the phone, but there is an app in the market called WiFi Tether for root users. As you can imagine, it does the exact same thing as the $20/month app but requires root access to function. And it's free. (I might add that it's not 100% legal to use your phone to tether while rooted, but I have never heard of anyone getting charged for it).

 

[jr0065]

Yo Folks,

I've been looking at the idea of rooting my droid since the droid and never quite worked up the nerves to actually do it. Now that I got my X I think i'm just about ready to take the plunge. But before I do I want make sure that i'm well educated on the risk vs. rewards of doing so. My main two concerns are;

1. Can I destroy my phone in the process? Chances of that happening..
2. Is the process reversable without ota?
3. Will I be able to activate features such as wifi tethering without the pesky monthly sevice charge that's associated with it ?

I'm hoping for someone very knowledgable about rooting will post on this thread for less educated folks like myself. Using bullet format highly some of the quick risks vs. rewards of rooting this monster of phone. Help a brother out !

1- You can't destroy your phone just rooting it, it's the access to all the files in the phone that can destroy your phone depending what you do. i.e. if you delete some system files the phone needs to run properly. I've heard of some people deleting files the phone needed to run in trying to remove some of the apps VZW put on their aren't normally deletable (is that a word?).
2-I've heard factory reset will not remove root access on the X, not sure on this yet.
3- What Gnomesarealive said.