Nubee: Unlock root

[dm33]

I'm thinking of buying a used G1 to use on AT&T for a few months then switch to T-Mobile.
I currently have an iPhone and had assumed that it was trivial to unlock and root the phone. However some quick Googling has not found any easy solution to either.

Is there a simple way to unlock the phone that doesn't involve paying someone ?

 

[Jerry Hildenbrand]

Couple choices -
1. Buy one already rooted
2. Buy a used Android Developer Phone (they come with an unlocked boot loader)
3. Just go slow and follow one of the tutorials to root it. It's not as hard as it looks, and there's lots of folks who will be there to lend a hand if needed.

 

[prometheus]

Don't pay anyone to do this for you. It is relatively easy (relative to how hard it SOUNDS).

I met a friend after work at a bar and we rooted and overclocked his Droid in the time it took to drink $6 of beer. So, I guess he actually did pay me (since he bought the beer).

Don't let it overwhelm you, it's literally half an hour and about 20 keystrokes.

 

[mejohnsn]

Or longer

It could take a log longer if you read the wrong set of instructions, or read them wrongly because, oh, say, for example, the instructions were badly written, incomplete or out of date.

Indeed: one of the moderators pointed out in a sticky (on a related topic, but I forget exactly where), that some tutorials are very bad, a few are good: information that would be a lot more helpful to newbies if we had a link to one of the good ones!

During my own searches on this topic, I did not come up with even one tutorial I could consider trustworthy. One, for example, lost my trust by mentioning the procedure only for a Rodgers G1 Dream (mine is unlocked T-mobile G1), another by proposing the ridiculous idea of using a Windows Mobile device to write data to a microSD card, another by explicitly requiring that the user perform certain steps based only on old ROM version numbers...

I hope the idea is clear: it is as easy as you say ONLY if you happen to find a good tutorial, appropriate for your phone. Otherwise, disaster lurks, you can easily brick your phone. Or if not brick it, make a mess out of it that will take much longer than 20 minutes to fix.

One thing I am surprised to see none of them mention: after flashing with the new ROM, how does the user restore Google apps and third-party apps? Surely the recovery image was not made for this.

So please: instead of just saying it it that easy, show us an example of a tutorial so well written that it really IS that easy.

 

[Gmaxxx]

I have an old tmobile g1 that is currently broke (Screen). I am getting it fixed and want to root it but the question I have is can I root without having T-Mobile Service turned on?