I was trying to come up with some sort of vast, dramatic story about what I’ve done and why. But I get the feeling that all you’d really like to know is the answer to two questions. What is rooting your phone? and What do you get out of it? Well, I’ll try to tell you.

When we’re in the world of computers, having “root access” is all about having access to everything. You’re more likely than not the Administrator of your home computer, and that lets you do anything you like. Installing and uninstalling apps, formatting discs, changing system setting and stuff like that. By contrast, you probably aren’t the Administrator of your computer at work. You’ll just be a simple user that can only use the apps that the IT department see fit to give you. It’s all a matter of security.

Because of the great opportunity to really mess things up, you don’t have Administrator or Root access to your phone. Besides, it simply isn’t nessesary for most people to do what they want to with their phone. Root access is generally what you need when you want to do something with your phone that either your service provider or handset maker don’t want you to do. I suppose the most talked about case of this is people hacking their iPhone so they could install apps in the days before the app store, or unlocking the phone to work on any network.

Android phones don’t have quite the same restrictions, but the principle is the same. I had to gain root access to my phone so that I could do things with it that O2 and HTC don’t really want me doing.

So what are these things? Good question. After all I can already install any app I like and I moved to O2 to get this phone so I certainly don’t need to unlock the network. Not even iPhone users are suffering the same restriction that once caused the great unlocking community. Well, I want to install different ROMs on my phone.

What’s a ROM? Think of it basically as the operating system of your phone. That’s not entirely what it is, but that’s all the explanation you really need. Rather than hacking the current operating system, I’m hacking the phone and replacing the operating system with something completely different.

There are a couple of reasons for doing that. First of all the Android development goes very quickly and you can find yourself stuck with a handset running old software. Sometimes phones get updated by the handset maker, but more often than not they get updated by your network, and they tend to take an age over it. In my case my HTC Desire is running Android 2.1, the latest version of the OS is 2.2. HTC say they’ll be releasing an update sometime before the end of September, probably. Even after they do I’ll have to wait for O2 to load it up with their wallpapers and other crap before I can update my phone. You might be suffering even more if you’ve got a slightly older phone that’s running 1.6. With a rooted phone you can load any OS you want, including versions of the very latest.

Not only can you get the latest versions of the OS, you can choose which ROM you go for. For example HTC have their own UI that they put on top of Android with their own apps and widgets. It’s actually not bad, but it might not be for everyone. If you don’t like it you can download a ROM that doesn’t use the Sense UI. Maybe you’d like an OS that’s stripped of everything except the most basic software, you can do that too. The possibilities are endless.

The majority of ROMs are free (which is to say I haven’t found one asking for money yet) and gaining root access to the phone is as easy as could be. I used an app called Unrovoke 3. All I had to do was download the version for my phone, set it running on my Mac (there are also PC and Linux versions) and connect my phone to the computer. Thirty seconds later my phone was rooted and ready to accept new ROMs. A quick search on the Market found ROM Manager, another free app, which lets you download new ROMs and switch between them when you feel like it.

After playing around with a few different ROMs I have eventually settled on what seems to be a leaked version of the HTC Sense ROM that will be out officially for my phone some time in the future. Something which has given me the ability to have seemingly endless storage for apps, HD Video recording, Wi-Fi Hotspot functionality and a much snappier experience when generally using my phone.

All in all it seems to have been worth it so far, but this is day 1 and I’m still reinstalling apps. There’s plenty of time for something to go wrong. One very important piece of information you need to know before you try this is that you will absolutely 100% invalidate the warranty of your phone. Make no mistake about it, if you brick your phone it’s your problem. Do this and you lose the ability to ever complain to your network about a handset problem. That said, I haven’t broken mine…yet.

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