Any reason NOT to root and ROM my phone?

[MustangDan74]

Ive been doing a ton of reading but it's getting overwhelming. I'm unhappy with the amount of junk on my phone that I will never use, I would love to see improved battery life (even though I have the extended battery) and I'm curious to check out the ICS ROM that is out there. Ive had my phone for about 5 weeks and I'm wondering, is there any reason for me NOT to root my phone and clean things up, along with flashing a new ROM?

Thanks--Dan

 

[xxfallacyxx]

There are things to consider, though whether or not you'd consider them reasons I cannot tell. They weren't reasons that stopped me, but they were reasons that stopped others.

When you're rooted and rom'd, you're tech support if you brick your phone.
Once you've unlocked your phone, it changes the conditions of your warranty. It doesn't void the warranty altogether, but it does say that if something you did causes hardware damage (overclocking, overheating, etc) then it's your loss.
ROMs have bugs. It comes with the territory. Then again, so do the OTA releases
It is addicting. If you learn to flash one ROM, you may find yourself wanting to flash them all.

 

[NHBass39]

I'd leave it stock. IMHO

 

[MustangDan74]

Another question, when I root and ROM will I lose all my downloaded and paid for apps?

 

[Wanda]

Not necessarily.

Rooting only gives you superuser permission to do things you wouldn't otherwise be allowed to do. One of those things is to use an app called Titanium Backup to make, oddly enough, backups of all your apps and their associated data so you can transfer them to other ROMS. You can also, through the recovery portion of the phone, make an entire system backup called a nandroid backup. A nandroid is a complete system wide snapshot of the phone at the time you made it. I would highly recommend you do that after you've rooted before you do anything else. You can then do pretty much whatever you want and if it goes wrong you can just resotre the backup you made and *PRESTO* your entire system is back the way it was After the nandroid is done you can use Titanium to make a backup of the apps, either the specific ones you want to keep or just a batch backup of all of them. Then, using Titanium again, you can go through and delete the crap you don't want like all the VZ garbage, Teeter, pretty much anything. Be careful though, it will delete anything and I mean ANYTHING. Make sure you know what it is before you blow it up.

So, you've done all that and your running stock, rooted, and de-bloated, now you want to try out a ROM. Here's the process I use, I first make backups of my apps through Titanium, not all of them just the ones I want to bring over to the new ROM. Then make a nandroid backup just in case either the instillation goes wonky, or I just don't like the ROM, it's buggy, or maybe its just not what I thought it was going to be...this way again, I can just do a restore and its like nothing ever happened. After that flash the ROM. When its up and running just re-download Titanium from the market and there you go, you can now restore your apps and data. I try to not restore app data from ROM to ROM with a few exceptions like Angry Birds and other apps that I don't feel like starting from square one on.

Long answer for a short question but there it is...enjoy.

Oh, and if you do somehow manage to "brick" it, you're not entirely on your own, we'll all be here. I've had plenty of people guide me through my first rooting experience and ROMing experience on my Inc when it first came out. I was a bit nervous but the benefits of not having Verzion's garbage to put up with outweighed the risk for me.

 

[MrSmith317]

Ok just to clear up one thing. Unless something goes so very very very very wrong during one of the processes, you CANNOT brick the Rezound. Dev Unlock doesn't allow enough latitude to brick the phone.

 

[Wanda]

Ok just to clear up one thing. Unless something goes so very very very very wrong during one of the processes, you CANNOT brick the Rezound. Dev Unlock doesn't allow enough latitude to brick the phone.

Exactly. Thats why I called it "bricked" with the quotes and all.