The Perpetual Guide to Rooting Your Android Phone

We Android users tend to appreciate having proper access to our phones. After all, we've paid for them, why shouldn't we get to use them the precise way we want to? While Android phones tend to be more accessible to upgrades (unless the manufacturer or carrier specifically prohibits it, as some, like AT&T, do), they're still somewhat locked down. If you root your phone, however, you can do whatever you want to it.

Rooting your phone involves getting the highest level access to it, meaning that you have permission (in a technical sense) to make whatever changes to your phone that you want. This can be something as simple as deleting the unwanted applications that came with your phone, or as complex as re-enabling features deactivated by your carrier, or install a different version of Android. 

The problem with rooting an Android phone is that there are so many phones, and they each have different requirements. With the iPhone, there's basically just one phone, so there is, at any given point in time, only one method of rooting ("jailbreaking" for iOS fans) that you need to worry about. What's an Android fan with a lust for power to do?

Happily, our friends at Lifehacker have created what they call "The Always Up-To-Date Guide To Rooting Your Android Phone." As you might guess from the name, it's a list of current rooting methods, correlated with the various phones. Wondering how to root your Galaxy S? It's listed. HTC Desire, G2, or the Droid Eris? They're all there. If you've got a modern Android phone, it's on the list, and you're but minutes away from taking full control of it.

As always with rooting, buyer beware: rooting can frequently invalidate your warranty, so make sure you don't care about product support in the future before you pull the trigger.

via Lifehacker