One of the things that attracted me to the Android mobile OS platform is its ability to be customized by those willing to do a little tinkering. In stock form the Hero is vastly more customizable than the Palm Pre and it goes without saying that the system is far more flexible than a pre-jailbreak iPhone, but if you want complete control over your Android device then you’ll need root access to it. What is root access? The easiest way that I can think to explain it is that root access is “God Mode” for your phone, or for that matter, any other computing platform which employs a tiered method of user permissions. But what can you do with this God Mode? Well, for starters, you can erase those lame apps that the Hero ships with (like the NFL, TrashCAR / NASCAR and Sprint TV apps) or even move your apps onto your SD card. Of course, there’s lots of other stuff you can do when you have the freedom to access any part of the system you wish but what it really all boils down to is either being content with your phone as Sprint sold it to you, or taking the reins and customizing it with your own touch.

So why all the talk about rooting today? Well, my friend William Ruckman is also a Hero owner / fanatic and he saw fit to send in the following steps to take if you’d like to gain root access to your Sprint Hero. It should be noted that rooting your phone can be potentially dangerous (worst case scenario, you screw up and brick your phone). Also, I’m not 100% clear on whether William wrote this procedure completely on his own, borrowed heavily from other resources on the web, or some combination thereof. Bill, if you’d care to clarify that for me, I’ll be happy to update this post.

Presumably this would work on a non-Sprint Hero but since we’re both Sprint users, we can’t really verify that with complete certainty.

In case you want root, do this:

Download the Android SDK to your desktop.

http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

Open CMD.exe (Windows) and change directory to the tools directory in the Android SDK.

Make sure your phone is set to development mode under applications, and make sure you have the Android SDK and drivers installed.

Download asroot2 to the tools directory from here:

http://code.google.com/p/flashrec/source/browse/trunk/assets/raw/asroot2

In CMD.exe type:
———————–
adb push asroot2 /data/local/

adb shell

cd /data/local

chmod 0755 asroot2

./asroot2 /system/bin/sh

mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system

cd /system/bin

cat sh > su

chmod 0755 su

chown root.shell su

exit

exit
———————–

ROOTED!

Just copy a file and run the commands above! No installing, no flashing custom ROMs, no worries about bricking your phone!

Give it a restart and enjoy.

Seems pretty cut and dry to me, but again, proceed with caution. I know he says “no worries about bricking your phone” but don’t complain to me if you goof something up and your phone stops working, your boss fires you, your daughter becomes pregnant, the bank repossesses your farm, aliens invade, or the Mona Lisa disappears.

For those of you that would like to give Bill a shout to thank him or shoot him a question about this procedure, you can do so by stopping by his website.

Thanks again for the heads up, amigo!

Update: Bill wrote in to update me on the genesis of this procedure:

About 70% of the procedure I came up with. The rest I got from various forums. However, I found the exact same procedure after the fact in the XDA forum. The asroot2 binary is the key, the rest is just Linux basics.

So there you have it – proof that great minds think alike!