I am by no means an expert at rooting but I used wugfresh to root my phone and I am so glad I did. Wugfresh also allows you to unroot it and return it to stock so your warranty would still be honored. It's very easy to do. The program does it all for you. The roms out for this phone are amazing and run much better than my stock did. Also I upgraded the radios and eliminated my data problems for the most part. There are many roms that are basically ICS with more customization. I am so glad I rooted and I am not looking back.

 

I think most (if not all) of the custom ROMs are better than stock. I marvel at this pretty regularly, especially when it comes to updates...it seems like the bigger the organization, the slower they are to get things right.

Remember, though, that these ROMs are building on top of what Google has already made, too, so they can just make the improvements, they don't have to build the OS from scratch.

Personally, I'm a big rooting advocate. Yes, it technically voids your warranty. But with this phone, as long as it turns on, i.e. it's not completely lifeless, it can be returned to stock, unrooted and unlocked. And I have yet to see a single GNex on this forum that was deemed totally bricked due to rooting, etc. If it was that easy to do, someone would have managed by now.

As far as I know, you still lose everything, including "sdcard" contents, when you unlock the bootloader, so there's that to consider. Back up everything you can to your computer before attempting.

I don't think you paid anything extra for Google support, but you're not exactly throwing it away. Any time a new update comes out or even is leaked, it makes it into ROM updates way faster than it goes OTA to unrooted phones. Now, that puts the responsibility on you to keep up with ROM updates if you want them on your phone, but honestly, that's not so bad - in fact, it becomes kind of addictive. If you load a ROM,no, you won't get the OTA updates as they come, but as I said, they tend to make it into ROMs before they get pushed out anyway. If you just root, you can accept the OTAs but they will unroot you.

In 2+ years of rooting my Android phones, I have never once had a virus problem. I'm not saying they don't exist, but honestly, they're rare, and anyone smart enough to seek out help in the forums is probably smart enough not to install the obvious shmuckbait that most of these viruses live in.

For that other rare occurrence, I do keep Lookout on my phone (more for the lost/stolen thing, but it serves both purposes).

As for ROMs, I've never used Liquidsmooth but have seen a lot of love for it here. I run AOKP, and I think it's fantastic. I've never had a problem with burn in, but AOKP allows you to change the color of your nav buttons, so that may help with that. Do you have your screen on a lot?

Incidentally, I think Liquid comes with Leankernel, which is excellent on battery for most people, and I think the gain in battery life alone is reason enough to root.

Hope some of this helped. Happy to discuss it more if you like.

 

Thanks for the heads up on wugfresh. DLing it now.

 

Unlocked and 4.04, no root has been good enough for me. There are so many roms, it may be hard to find a good one. If you have the time, go for it.

 

Sounds like you're getting amazing battery life out of the box, far better than I was. That's great, but in general, yes, a custom kernel (included with ROMs, or standalone) would probably improve on that even more.

Even if your phone is rooted, each individual app has to be granted superuser permissions. This isn't as annoying as it sounds; the first time you open an app that requires root, it will give you a little popup asking if you want to allow it. You can choose to allow it once, or tick a little box to remember the answer. I almost always tick the box, because if I trust an app to have root once, odds are I'm going to need it to keep doing what it's doing. So unless you manually granted the app root permission, you shouldn't be in any more danger with a virus-laden app than if you were unrooted.

I use Airdroid to move the files over to my phone from my computer, but in theory you can browse to them on your phone and download them from there as well. It's generally better practice to download them on the computer, as it's easier to check the md5 sums (and make sure that the file downloaded correctly, so you're not trying to run a corrupted file on your phone).

The other option here is to wait for (for instance) Milestone 5 on AOKP, or whatever equivalent other ROMs use, as the milestone releases don't introduce new features from the most recent builds, but instead are focused on being as stable as humanly possible. They update more rarely, but that may not matter if you're happy with one, anyway.

A "nandroid" is actually the backup you create in custom recovery. It's basically an image of your whole system (including homescreens, apps and settings, as well as ROM/kernel version) at that moment, so if a flash somehow goes wrong (usually human error, we all miss a step once in a while) you can simply revert back to how your phone was before you started the flash.

Titanium is used to backup your actual apps and data, and I have it, but I use it selectively. The source of a lot of frustration for a lot of people is just selecting "restore all apps and data" in Titanium. You don't want to restore system apps, only the ones you downloaded, but it is definitely the best way to get your apps back intact after a flash & wipe.

Just to be clear, I'm not actually trying to convince you; if you're honestly not sure, I'd say don't do it. Having a rooted phone really is a responsibility, in my opinion. I just want to offer as much information as I can, because while there are some really good guides here on the forums and elsewhere on the net of the technical stuff - the step-by-step - I would have liked to have more discussion available about the overview, the jargon, etc, when I was first thinking of rooting (my Droid X, at that time).

 

Restoring all apps and data in Titanium loads another copy of the system apps on top of the ones already there, so it almost always screws up your data connectivity and the Google apps.