5How 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.