[PLUG-TALK] Rooting Android phone

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Mon Mar 7 05:36:10 UTC 2011


Apparently it is possible to root my Atrix 4G. 

I can find lots of pages about rooting phones, all of which assume you
know what the term means. I don't. I am guessing that it means wipe out
the installed OS and install a real open source version of Android.
What is far less clear is what the implications are. Presumably I would
have to uninstall/reinstall all the stuff and all the settings that I
have done in the past ten days. But will the phone still work? What are
the advantages/disadvantages? 

Let me give a fr'instance. I lose phones regularly, so the GPS in my
Atrix 4G is cool because I can go to motoblur.com, log in with the
account that the AT&T store dude set up (with the wrong name), and it
will find my phone. I can do this with any computer that has an internet
connection and a web browser. It is accurate to about seven meters,
which is close enough to identify the restaurant I left it in. And if
they say they don't have it, I can tell them which table to look under.
So if I root the phone, presumably Motoblur goes away. What is the
alternative?

What about battery usage? I am familiar with lots of problems on
laptops with Linux where the power management does not work as well as
it does on that other OS. 

What about how many bars of bandwidth I get? At home I barely get two
bars, and most other places only three. It's so bad I can't stream
internet radio without constant stopping and buffering. Yet the phone
always says it is connected to H+, which is AT&T's current version of
"4G, but not really."

And there are dozens more questions that I haven't even thought of yet.

Suggestions, observations and insights welcome.



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