Weekend Open Forum: Do you jailbreak/root your smartphone?

My wife and I were out shopping and we stopped by a Verizon kiosk and I purchased a Thunderbolt along with the HTC extended battery. We walked 6ft and took a seat at a table. My wife went to get lunch while I installed my micro SD card (with custom rom .zip already located on it) into the Thunderbolt, took out my laptop and within 3 Min I had it rooted and another 5-10min I had the Cubed rom installed. All this before my wife got back with the the food.

My wife and I have had several Android based phones and everyone has been rooted and all of mine have had custom roms installed.

Our big reasons for rooting it are Titanium backup, apps with the ability to wifi tether or hotspot (without paying a second fee), Adfree. Being able to get rid of the bloat ware.

And for me it's just fun to play around.

And a side note: The Verizon employee who helped us stopped by after we were finshed eating and was curious if I was able to root it. (by the way while purchasing the phone we were talking about phones, rooting, the dangers of doing it, custom roms, cool apps avalable to rooted phones) I helped him root his Thunderbolt before we left the mall.

Same. I also jailbroke my (at the time) girlfriend's iPod Touch. I restored my iPod Touch and returned it within the 30 days though because I wanted the money instead.

I hate to break this too ppl who root/jailbreak their phones. DOING IT VOIDS THE WARRENTY!!
If you do this you void any manufacter or extended warrenty. I had to find this out the hard way. If you do root/jailbreak your phone and you break it, prepare to pay full price to replace it. Cellphone companies take a VERY firm stance on rooting and jailbreaking. And god help you if your still under contract when you break it. They wont replace it. And you either continue to pay for a service you cant use or eat a hefty 300$+ Early Termination Fee. IF you want to root or jailbreak your phone PLS PLS PLS wait till you are available to get an upgrade on your phone. Then do it.

Some are easier to root than others.

lg optimus 2x . This phone can be bought cheaply sim free, so now its rooted with cm7 , runs sweet as a nut

I've rooted my SGS2 just to see what I can do with the phone fortunately it has everything I need so i went to what they call a frankenstien OS on xda and I just update it when there is a new version.

Same here.

My friends do this though.

It does void the Warranty but if you pay the replacment insurance then you are set as long as you can live without a phone for a couple of days. If you end up having a problem just (break the phone) to a point where it is not able to boot to any kind of a screen. No questions asked.
I had to do that once early one. I took the phone to a verizon store in the morning and I had a replacement the next day Fed-Ex.

Yes, I do indeed.

I used to jailbreak my ipod touch but it broke down after a year and when i upgraded to an iphone 3gs it never worked so i stopped jailbreaking and that was the best 2 years of my life

nope my little bro did that to his phone and it wouldnt boot, he ended up paying 100$ through his insurance for a new one

See, bricking an Android device is actually pretty hard. You really need to messing around in ultra-deep levels where you shouldn't be poking your head in.

There's always tutorials on how to unbrick a soft-bricked device.

Running Cyanogenmod 7.1 with ICS Theme on my SGS Fascinate 3G+, and loving it.

I'm not sure really what rooting is but i got the phone unlocked, eraased the phone's network operater brand and installed an offical universal rom from the phones manufacture. Then installed my favourite apps like Jeanie (voice control misc), Crackle (free full shows/movies), TuneIn (radio& music), Webroot (antivirus, safe web, lost phone), Officesuite ( read doc,pdf, ebooks), ABC News (writen/video news), ebay (buying stuff) and Angry Birds (game). Mail, web brwser, Navigation, Facebook and such already comes installed by default. Not really root just a different rom to make phone usability and performance better.

@Leeky
Why not Galaxy Nexus? I'd say it is a much better option than the S2 IMO .............

I root my android phones simply to allow me to perform actions that should have existed in the original firmwares as standard. An example is titanium backup.

rooting deffo doesnt cause any issues you have mentioned above it is near impossible for it to do so. What would be the root (no pun :d) would be a possible flakey/unstable firmware that might have been loaded (which could have easily been corrected)

I like the IPHONE. Don't hate, but it is only bcx it looks like a beast. I would luv the new phone dat is black, like the samsung gs2, but rly only if I jailbreak it.
Any thoughts on whether it should be against the law to root the phones?

i unlocked my windows phone. it's a LG Optimus 7. i can say it is probably the easiest wp handset to unlock, since it can unlock itself (through Lg's own engineer menu - registry) out-of-the-box.