"Got Root?" is a greeting in unix nerd circles and like most puns it has made it onto t-shirts, posters and mugs. Root is the name of the administrators account on a Unix system and therefore having Root means that you have administrators privileges. In the era of smart phones, iPhones, thingamabobs and do-hickeys Root has been made into a verb.
Rooting means getting root access on your Android OS smartphone. So far so good but rooting your phone allows you to do all kinds of neat stuff that you can't otherwise such as enable tethering (using your phone as a modem), move apps to the SD card to save space, install new versions of the OS, set the phone to the language you want and run all kinds of cool/geeky apps. For a more in depth info on the benefits check out this page over at Android Police. On a side note: rooting is somewhat different to jailbreaking on iOS because jailbreaking allows you to circumvent the limitations set by Apple such as only being able to install apps from the official distribution channel - the iTunes App Store. Android OS does not have the same restrictions.
I rooted my HTC Hero back in june. I grew more and more impatient with HTC promising to release an official update to Android OS 2.1. I had the phone since November 2009 and it was increasingly becoming evident that Android OS 1.5 wasn't as polished as I wanted it to be: The Phone interface lagged so much that I missed calls, the LED indicators didn't work and the headphone jack was a plug and pray experience. Rumours about the update started circulating sometime in April then HTC said they would release it in June, then July, then August and so on. So I took the step over to the dark side.
Now rooting isn't for the faint of heart since it can potentially brick your phone and it will probably void your warranty. But as an early adopter took it upon myself to try. I read up a little on rooting on the internet and followed the instructions here.
Since I had basically no experience with using custom ROMs (modified versions of the OS) I chose VillainRom because it was used in the example I followed. Installation was easy and within half an hour I was running Android OS 2.1 and the lag was much improved and the LEDs and the headphone jack worked as advertised. However the first couple of releases of VillainRom that I tried had their fair share of problems. I began with version 10 but it was only when I installed 10.3 that I got a phone with the same level of stability and battery performance that I had before the upgrade. Yesterday I upgraded to version 12 and it works really really well and the few issues I had with 10.3 have all been resolved (such as the sketchy notification function).
So would I advice anyone else to Root? If you just want 2.1 on your Hero you can use the official update (it was finally released in September in the Netherlands) but depending on your needs I would still recommend it for fellow early adopters out there.
After all it's a nice feeling being able to stick it to the man!
