Thinking about rooting and custom rom...

[slownis]

I'm still stock on my Epic 4g. A normal me would have rooted a long time ago, but it makes me nervous because I use it as my company phone. Now, it is "my" phone, as in I pay the bill - but the company gives me a partial reimbursement for the phone bill monthly. But in order to continue using it as a company phone I need it to:

a) have no problems with corporate exchange email
b) Work well as a phone also

More on a) - my company implements security policies so that I am required to input a numeric 8 digit password to unlock my phone every time the display goes off. When I set up Active Sync with my exchange account, it basically locks in this security setting. Is this going to cause any problems?

The main reason I want to root is that I would like better battery life, get rid of some bloat programs, and also have the tethering ability.

So will I be OK to proceed with all this?

 

[Paul627g]

I don't see a problem with any of these requests. Things should work the same on custom ROM/rooted as they did with stock.

 

[ratsttam]

Going a much milder route, you can simply root, you seem to be more talking about using a custom rom. Lately I've been using the latest fc09? stock rom, rooted, installed titanium, and removed/froze the system apps I don't need. You're still basically stock this way, and just killing those apps helps with battery life and responsiveness of the phone. But like Paul said, all the custom roms (the many touchwiz based, CM7, CM9, MIUI, AOKP) should have no problem with what you're trying to do.

In your shoes, I would either stay stock/rooted, or go with CM7. I've had calls just drop to VM while using ICS based roms (cm9, aokp, miui), but that could be more signal issues than rom, although it only happens on ics.

You can also try "touchdown for smartphones". There's a free trial, and the full version is a bit pricy at $20, but it will isolate your exchange data, keeping it secure, but seperate from your personal data on the phone. If your exchange admin sends a wipe command, it will only wipe touchdown, and not your whole phone. Worth trying the free one to see if that will do what you need too.