Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Rooted By Android Developers

Written by John Thompson on July 13, 2010 · Filed under How To, Tech 

If you’re a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 owner, you’ll no doubt love to know that your device has now been rooted! A few days ago, a member over at xda-developers posted the details of his hack, which allows you to gain root access on your device, resulting in various advantages over stock devices.

We’ve covered the details of other Android devices being rooted in the past, and how to do it, including Google’s own Nexus One, which was rooted in no time after its release earlier this year. Although the Xperia X10 owners who wanted rooting have had to wait a little while longer for their device to be rooted, but it’s definitely been worth the wait for most users.

Why Should I Root My Xperia X10 Android Phone?

Many of you may be reading this and thinking “so why would I want to ‘root’ my phone anyway, what advantages does it bring?” Technically, the advantages of rooting your phone depend greatly on what phone you have. For example, the advantages of rooting your T-Mobile G1 device are massive, because you can use a vast number of custom ROMs on your phone, with some such as Cyanogen even providing Froyo (Android 2.2) on the dated hardware.

With the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, this aspect of rooting your phone may not be as beneficial, because there isn’t as much community support for the device like there is for some of the more interesting pieces of hardware, such as Google’s own Nexus One. However, don’t let this discourage you, because there’s one thing that all rooted devices can do that stock devices can’t: install special applications which require root access.

You’ll find some applications in the Market which require “root access”, meaning that they won’t function properly without special access to the system that only rooted phones can provide. The specific applications depend on the phone’s hardware, but there are some great rooted apps out there, such as ‘ShootMe’, that can greatly enhance your Android experience!

How Do I Root My Xperia X10?

Bin4ry’s post over at xda-developers provides detailed steps on how to root your phone without any problems. There are actually two ways that are detailed in the post, allowing you to use either flashtool or Omnius to root your phone.

It’s certainly do-able, and fairly straight forward compared to some of the other Android phones out there which have been rooted, but if you’re a complete stranger to the command line, you probably shouldn’t root your phone yourself. All of the commands which have to be executed are either explained in great detail, or made available in the many download packages that are required before you can root your phone, so if you’ve rooted a phone before, or simply feel up to the challenge, then go ahead and knock yourself out!

Remember! Rooting your phone immediately voids the manufacturer warranty of your device, so if anything goes wrong during the whole process, you’re most probably on your own from there on out. Of course, it’s pretty difficult to ‘brick’ any modern Android phone, but it can still be done with you having superuser permissions!

If you do decide that you want to root your phone, be sure to let us know how you fare in comments below! Good luck!