I still hum and hah about rooting my Desire HD. I used a Gold Card to take it off Orange UK and install the generic HTC ROM, but wonder whether rooting would make the Gold Card unnecessary. I have not really got a handle on what a Gold Card actually is yet, so am pasting my research here:
androidtipsnapps.com tells me what a Gold Card is:
A GoldCard is a special SD card which, when inserted into your device, allows you to flash RUU files with a different CID to your own device. For example, if you own a T-Mobile branded device, this will allow you to flash a generic ROM.
A bit of googling of CID tells me it is Carrier ID, and xda-developers has two useful entries:
CID
The CID (Carrier ID) of the device is a setting which determines which carrier ROMs should be allowed to run on the device, a table of valid CIDs can be found in the wiki pages. All bootloaders (apart from HardSPL and SSPL) will only allow a ROM with the correct CID to be flashed onto the device. A device which has been CID unlocked will have SuperCID which allows ANY ROM to be loaded onto the device, SuperCID also unlocks the Ext_ROM and allows it to be mounted.
CID Unlock
Load any carrier ROM (in any language) on the device.
Which leads me to suspect that I should be looking for CID Unlocking. Is that different from SIM locking? xda came to my aid again but this does not tell me whether I need a gold card once I have rooted the phone. I then finally did the obvious:
androidcentral.com suggested that you don’t need a gold card after rooting as did addictivetips.com.
I’m still left with the dilemma of whether to root it or not though. 🙁