Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Rooting your Smartphone

Rooting and un-locking your PCs BIOS seem to have parallels. The mindset that tells the nerd that he or she is not getting "all that they paid for" and have a device that does not have its full functionality.

As many have said - just because you can, it doesn't mean that you should.

I have been monitoring a number of sources that talk of "rooting" Android powered devices such as the Asus Transformer Prime and the unlocking of computers with Insyde H2O UEFI BIOS. The owners of such devices hope to get access to hidden features and/or menus that will allow overclocking and access to other operating system - basic hardware adjustments.

In many of these cases there is nothing to be gained by the exercise and the fact that the manufacturers have purposely locked the bootloader on the devices in question. This is generally done to minimize the damage that the un-skilled users can wreak. 

1 comment:

Nanticoke said...

I can't really see the point in "rooting". True, there is much talk of "fragmentation" of the Android platform, but this doesn't get away from the fact that when you buy a device it should "just work" (you shouldn't need to jump through hoops to get it to do what you want it to)