Rogers recently changed their cancellation policy, the tl;dr version, you pay whatever is left on the cost of your device.

Say if you go to the Rogers store and get the Samsung Galaxy S2 phone, for 99 dollars, then cancels the next day, you would have to pay 450 dollars. The subsidy for the phone. And if you cancel 12 months into your contract, the cancellation fee would be (450/36)*(36-12). So you get the point. However, this plan is only effective for those who recently signed a contract for a phone, or did a HUP, since I did neither of that, I am on the old cancellation policy. I called in, and found out that if I was to cancel today, I would pay the same amount of money, 450 dollars for early cancellation fee. So why not do a HUP?

That I did, that I did.

I upgraded my Motorola Milestone to the Samsung Galaxy S2 LTE phone, boy oh boy, was it a nice upgrade. It is fast, but then again, I got the Milestone the minute it came out. (It had Android 1.6 on it at first.)

The phone is almost amazing, but s##tty Rogers added a crap ton of junk apps and Samsung added useless apps as well. Sadly those apps are “System apps”, apps that you can not simply delete. These apps in questions are not needed for the operation of the phone, they are stupid apps like “urMusic” from Rogers, and “Social Hub” from Samsung, which is rather useless. Time to clean up the phone a bit.

Rooting the phone

I rooted the phone the minute I got home. Rooting the phone requires a bit of terminal knowledge.

Steps (From of xda):

Download the zergRush exploit, the su binary, and the Superuser.apk app from:

• zergRush exploit [here]
• su binary and Superuser.apk [here]

Once you acquire these binaries, fire up the terminal, go to the Android SDK, and locate the adb tool then:

Open up a terminal and execute:

• adb push /path/to/zergRush /data/local
• adb shell
• chmod 755 /data/local/zergRush
• /data/local/zergRush
• Wait for about 5 minutes, for the zergRush exploit to root the phone

• adb remount
• adb push /path/to/Superuser.apk /system/apk
• adb push /path/to/su /system/bin
• adb shell
• chmod 644 /system/app/Superuser.apk
• chmod 4755 /system/bin/su
• reboot

Voila, the phone is now rooted.

sudo mksandwich -mode bitch >/dev/mouth

Once we root the phone we should be able to see:

The Superuser app listing applications that have root permissions.

The next step is to delete unwanted applications from the phone, head to the market place and install TitaniumBackup. This will allow us to backup the phone and remove those unwanted applications.

I removed the following “system applications” without any harm:

• IM
• Rogers Live
• Samsung Apps
• Shop
• Social Hub
• urMusic
• urMusic New Releases
• Music (I’m using the leaked ICS music application, so that I can sync against my Google Music account)

After this step the phone should be clean of unwanted apps.

The next step is to make the phone ad free, or relatively ad free, head to the market place and install AdFree Android. This will allow us to modify the hosts files, which in essence disallow ads being loaded.

Remember, both the TitaniumBackup and the AdFree Android app requires the phone to be rooted.

So now we have an amazing phone, without those unwanted apps, nor ads. Go nuts.

Oh, and you also should get an Otterbox for your phone, the Rogers Samsung S2 LTE version of the phone (with the 4 buttons on the bottom) is the same as the AT&T skyrocket version of the phone, so pick one of these cases up.