My 2 Cents - Answers
1. What does rooting a droid do?
Rooting is basically allowing you to access Administrator type rights on your phone. It extends the flexibility and capabilities of your phone at the expense of some security built into the locked down OS (Stock).
2. What are roms?
ROMs are basically user cooked OS' that act differently or have been optimized to change the way in which things run. It allows ROM cookers to take the best pieces of code from versions and tweak them to increase performance or look.
3. What are the pros/cons of rooting my droid?
For the Droid 1 at this point there are plenty of pros. You have access to some wonderful utilities and it will probably be the only way you get to the next version of the Android OS (just a guess but they won't extend an OTA above 2.2 to D1 users). It does allow you to do things like Wirelessly Tether, stop Ads from most free programs, use Backup Managers, Overclock your phone, and my favorite: Use SetCPU to conserve battery life. The con is that it is possible to brick your phone if you do it incorrectly.
4. Will i be able to unroot it
Once rooted you can unroot through a few methods. The easiest of which is to flash a ROM to remove Superuser Access through an app called ROM Manager.
5. Will it increase the speed of my droid
It can as you can overclock it with something like Set CPU but it can cause instability also and is somewhat hardware dependent (i.e. it acts differently depending on your specific unit and the ROM / Kernel being used. ). Unfortunately trial and error is your only way to tell here as each unit seems to act uniquely.
6. will it incrase the ram of my droid
Not really.
7. is it dangerous to root a droid
No. Ninjas will not attack you if you have a rooted phone. Regardless of what Verizon might say. There is the potential to brick your phone though.
8. what is like the main reason people root droids and what different things can you do with a rooted droid rather then a droid thats not rooted.
I think I answered that above but my top reasons were Wireless Tethering my iPad, use of SetCPU for maintaining battery life. I like the other stuff too!
9. Is it legal?
It is not illegal.. but it does have the potential to void your warranty.
10. how can i root my droid
There are plenty of walkthroughs and sticky's in this forum but if you read them and are still unclear you might want to stay clear. I do not think there has been a one click solution for the latest build of Froyo on the Droid 1. You might want to wait until someone develops a 1 click solution again as that worked great for a bunch of my friends.
11. would you root your droid or have you rooted your droid
Yeah I rooted my Droid a while ago. It was a pain to do back then but I have not regretted it yet but I have hosed my phone so again only do it if you do not need your phone on a daily basis and you are comfortable with the concepts discussed on the forums here.
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