I just ordered mine from t-mobile and can't wait to get it. I had successfully rooted my samsung behold II before so I think I should be able to root the blaze too. Just want to know what are some of the challenges after you root it and try to remove those bloatware? Is there another tutorial somewhere for people who were able to successfully remove all (or some) bloatware? What are those bloatwares? After successfully removing them, did anyone ever try to do a benchmark comparison and see any significant performance gain (or is it just free up more internal memory to install for other apps)?? Thanks!
Read this thread:
[HOWTO][TAR][BLAZE 4G] THE ODIN THREAD :: Return to stock, fix soft brick :: 4/9/12 - xda-developers
Ignore well meaning, but uninformed posts about your phone magically being faster from removing system applications you choose to.
That nonsense has been completely debunked even as far back as 2 years ago. In short, there are reasons for people to want to remove system applications, but the concept of you getting faster performance for having an application be uninstalled is a complete fabrication just based on people assuming that Android works the same as their Desktop OS.
What they fail to realize is Android is designed to run on things with small resources, and as such, it handles things differently. An app will stay active in ram even though it is not doing anything at all, if the OS has a reason to believe it will have better battery life by keeping it open. Apps active in ram DO NOT CONSUME CPU CYCLES JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE ACTIVE IN RAM. Additionally, your phone could have only 200 megs of ram available, or 750 megs of ram available, and it will PERFORM JUST THE SAME.
Pertaining to your "benchmarking" question, that is debatable if it would even apply. There are a bunch of benchmarking applications available but you won't see any difference in before or after using them. Their value is different from what you might think, and the information obtained from using them, is only usable to compare "performance" between different rom's, which we don't have on this phone yet, or to make controlled decisions for people who want to use cpu governing.
In short, if you want to use something that REQUIRES root access, such as extended bluetooth controls, cpu speed apps, cmw, then by all means that is what the rooted kernel is for.
Otherwise, you really don't have a reason to.