To be honest,I'm not 100% sure,but,I'd say that staying stock is the only sure way you'd receive update notifications from MOTOROLA or SPRINT.

That's not to say that you couldn't un-root & restore to factory stock to receive future updates.

You may want to confer w/some of the PHOTON users who may have rooted back in the early release period of 2011 to get some user experiences w/software/firmware updates.

I myself got the PHOTON later on (OCT 2011) & all the software/firmware updates had already been pushed by then.

I've kept my phone stock & like you, are looking @ stepping it up to the next level.

 

With firmware/OS updates you are almost guaranteed to loose root. Eventually, somewhere down the line a root method is found until the next update. PRL updates do not affect root. You tend to not see just one or two manufacturer apps updated as they would rather release a full OS update instead.

Now as far as rooted vs unrooted, I look at it this way, it's is extremly rare that the stock software is tuned to provide the best performance. By performance I mean RAM usage, lag, storage space, etc..It's mostly about what gimmicks and bloat can be installed and still have a usable device as it's going to be obsolete in six months anyways.

With that now behind us, what are you looking to achieve by rooting? Free wifi tether, remove bloat, things of that nature or are you looking to install custom ROMs and tune for performance?

 

There's a lot of useless junk in the stock software. For example, what's the point of a clock or calendar widget if tapping on the widget doesn't open the related app. So you install another app or widget to make up for the stock one being mostly useless. You now have multiple app/widgets running to perform one simple function. All the bloat and duplicated apps is the exact reason I made the deblur-debloat script. It might not be perfect but I am still actively developing, mostly I'm waiting on app developers to get back with me on including their app.

 

Did my guide and files not work?

 

Will you please guide me to where I can easily unroot the phone? I have some warranty issues and can't quite get the files I think i need.

 

Check out qbking77's posts here in this section.
Or,just do a search for the subject on YOUTUBE.

 

In this section I have the "all things moto" thread that links to my site where you can find all the files you need as well as a guide on how to use them. It is often suggested to to folks to use qbking77's videos and my files as his links are sometimes dead.