5Samsung Galaxy S3How to: Root the Samsung Galaxy S3

Pretty much the first thing I do when I get a new phone is root it. First and fore­most this allows me to install and enable adfree — which is get­ting increas­ingly essen­tial on android. On pre­vi­ous phones this was often tricky, altho in the last couple of years it has stead­ily got easi­er. This time it was the turn of my new Sam­sung Galaxy S3. Below I will sum­mar­ise the steps in my own way, but I had a look at sev­er­al guides on the net and the best one I found was on Android­Au­thor­ity.

  1. Make sure the phone drivers are installed. You can do this by installing Sam­sung Kies, or you can get the drivers on their own from xda-developers.
  2. I recom­mend installing Kies — as you may as well update to the latest release at the same time. Kies can take quite a long time to install, and seemed to me to go into a “hot­fix” loop, but I was patient enough for it to com­plete successfully
  3. Press and hold the vol down, home and power but­tons, for approx 20 sec, until the phone enters down­load mode, with text which starts “warn­ing”. Press the up vol to continue.
  4. Down­load the latest cf-auto-root for the S3 from chain­fire (update 11-Dec-2012: cf-auto-root has replaced cf-root).  Get the cor­rect ver­sion for your phone
  5. Down­load odin3 3.04 from xda-developers.
  6. Con­nect the phone cable to the PC and run odin. You should get a yel­low box
  7. Click on PDA and point to the down­loaded chain­fire file — in TAR format (if its still a zip you’ll need to extract the TAR from inside the zip)
  8. Click start
  9. The pro­cess should take about a minute

Once you’re up and run­ning take a look at my list of recom­men­ded android apps which is updated every 6 months or so. See the related posts sec­tion below for the latest version.

Leave a Reply

5 Comments

JSJon Scaife

I’d like to help, but I don’t have an i747m and I don’t ever buy any­thing from Apple so I have no way to exper­i­ment. Sorry 🙁

Reply
NNick

Hi. Very inter­est­ing read, thank you 🙂 Would the same pro­cess work for a HTC One X?

Would you be able to pro­duce an equally as easy to fol­low guide so I can under­stand how to jail­break a iPhone 4s to decide which oper­at­ing sys­tem would suit me best?

Reply
JSJon Scaife

Thanks.

The same pro­cess would­n’t work for the HTC, but their will be an equi­val­ent. I don’t know any­one with the One X so I haven’t had chance to write a guide yet but if I encounter one I will update accordingly.

I don’t buy Apple products so I’ve nev­er had a reas­on to jail­break one so I can­’t cur­rently pro­duce such a guide as I don’t have the know­ledge required. Over­all though I can highly recom­mend the S3 or the OneX and as far as I’m con­cerned they’re both much bet­ter products than what Apple have to offer. Get the S3 — you won’t regret it 🙂

Reply