What is Rooting and Unlocking, and How Does it Benefit Me?
We’ve all heard of it, people ask you if you’ve “rooted” your phone; well have you? If not, it may be about that time you let us do it for you!
The basic concept of rooting your phone is that you have essentially “God-Mode” over your phone via Superuser. What rooting does is give you administrator privileges over your phone, which your carrier and manufacturer don’t want you to have. But why don’t they want you to have it? Rooting allows you to put third-party applications on your phone such as FREE Wireless Tethering, and other nifty tools that truly allow you to take control and really make your phone as smart as it can be. If that’s not enough, it can also allow you to completely UPGRADE your OS to the newest version of Android!
Now unlocking a phones bootloader is a slightly more advanced process. In a nutshell, it means you can adjust your “kernel” or even completely swap it out. What does that allow you to do? It allows you to make your phones processor go FASTER or SLOWER than it is normally set to, meaning your phone can run incredibly smoother, or when you’re not using it, will automatically set itself to a lower setting to save your battery life, and it saves your battery life like nothing you’ve ever experienced. Not ALL phones allow you to do this; usually Samsung and HTC products are the most common phones to be unlocked. But check it out; we have A LOT of those for sale! Every phone usually has a different way of rooting it, usually through a security flaw in the system that gets exploited by hackers, and it can sometimes be quite tedious and annoying, but the benefits are vast. Truly, if the developers support it, you can have a G1, and be running 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, on a phone that wasn’t even supposed to get 2.3 Gingerbread! Now what does that mean? It means you’re “future-proofing” your smart phone so you don’t feel so outdated every time a new phone comes out! So you ship us your phone, we root/unlock for you, and we ship it back. Congratulations, you just made an extremely wise decision.
Are there risks to rooting/unlocking your phone? Of course there are, but again, the rewards are quite great if done correctly! This is why it’s usually smart to have someone who knows a great deal about this topic do it for you if you’re even the slightest bit uneasy about it. With us, you get a 14 day satisfaction guarantee, but we’re confident, you will be happy.
March 9th, 2012 on 12:53 pm
(Wireless Phone) I’ve owned smart phones since 2000 had a Kyocera 6035, Samsung i300, i500, and a few gtonraeiens of Palm Treo’s, so I have some preconceived notions on what to expect from a smartphone. This is my first Android phone, and based on the specs it should be a great phone. Compared to the higher end Samsung Galaxy S Android phones, this pretty much has it all except for a few key differences: 1. slower 800 MHz processor (vs 1000 MHz) 2. smaller RAM size 256MB (vs 512MB) 3. lower resolution 480 320 screen (vs 800 480) 4. lower resolution 3.2 MP camera (vs 5MP) 5. smaller 4.6 x2.4 face size (vs 4.9 x2.5 ) 6. older OS Android 2.1 (vs Android 2.2) as of 12/21/2010 Besides being watered a down a little on specs, it pretty much has EVERYTHING else full slide out keyboard, both front and rear cameras, LED camera flash, wifi, etc. If you look at the 6 things above, it is still pretty good 800MHz isn’t much different from 1GHz, plus it consumes less power. 256MB seems enough to run all the apps I’ve tried. 480 320 is the same resolution as the iPhone 3G, and it still is pretty darn good. Using a tiny lens, pictures captured by the 3.2MP CCD aren’t much different in overall quality than ones captured with a 5MP CCD. The smaller form factor was a big plus for me (same size as an iPhone, just a little thicker to accommodate the slide-out keyboard) since the Galaxy S phones feel too bulky in my pocket. This phone also costs a lot less, and with Sprint it doesn’t carry that idiotic $10 monthly add-on fee for the privilege of owning a higher end phone . So why isn’t this a 5-star phone!? Well, mainly because of item #6 the older Android 2.1 OS runs the UI (user interface) so slowly, with so much lag, that it’s almost unusable, at least from the point of view of the power user who wants to get things done quickly without much fuss. On my phone it is common to see lag times in the 3-5 second range after tapping on something on the screen before the phone responds. Often the phone is too slow to track the movement of finger swipes across the screen properly so if you are trying enlarge a web page, answer the phone, turn on speaker phone, etc., you often have to try 2-3 times to get it to work. Also lots of native apps that you can download from the Android market are actually built as web pages that run off the built-in webkit engine, and they use a lot of javascript. Well, the experience with those apps isn’t great, javascript is agonizingly slow. In addition to the UI performance, there are a few design oversights which may or may not be an issue for other users. The biggest one for me is the lack of an LED indicator to tell you when there is something pending. So to check if you missed a call or if you have a new text, you have to turn on the screen, authenticate (which I have to do slowly so the phone can keep up with my finger movements), and pull down the status bar, and unless there is something pending you did it for nothing. In contrast my old smart phones used to just flash an LED which meant you need to check something , so you could tell whether or not you needed to turn the screen on at all. Another peeve is that answering/hanging up a call is done via swiping your finger across the screen (i.e., with software) as opposed to having a hardware button to push, which means I have to be looking at my phone whenever I answer or silence a call I can’t just reach into my pocket and push a button. Finally, the battery life isn’t very good, and it charges slowly (~2 hours). I have to charge my phone every day, and keep a charger in the car to make sure I don’t run out of juice, but I suspected this would be the case before I bought the phone based on reviews of other Android phones. Based on the performance improvements featured in the Android 2.2 release (just-in-time compilation, V8 javascript engine) and the reports of users with other Android phones that saw a remarkable difference when they upgraded to 2.2, I would speculate that this would be a great midrange phone if/when Samsung finally releases an upgrade to Android 2.2. They promised a release by the end of the year, and it’s 12/21 and still nothing, so it’s quite possible they decided to focus their resources elsewhere and we may never see Android 2.2 on this phone. Most likely their folks are working on getting the new Android 2.3 working on their higher end phones first. So, until Samsung releases Android 2.2 for this phone, I would recommend you stick with a different phone that already has Android 2.2+ on it.