How & Why I Jailbroke My iPhone

how-why-jailbreak

Like you, I was very skeptical about this whole jailbreaking-your-iPhone thing. I always had the perception that once you do it you can’t undo it and I also feared that I would  somehow be breaking the law.

Rest assured, it’s nearly impossible to do any damage to your iPhone that cannot be undone (provided you’re smart and backup your iPhone before you consider doing anything to it), and no, it most certainly is not illegal to jailbreak your iPhone.

Heads Up

There is one caveat though: jailbreaking your iPhone does violate your service contract with AT&T. All this means is that if the jailbreak software goes bad, AT&T can’t help you. BUT, all you have to do to fix it is restore your iPhone to the backed-up version you created before you started this journey. Yay!

One other hang up I had was that even if I did jailbreak my iPhone, what the heck do I do with it? I’m not an iPhone developer. I can’t make my own apps (yet). Luckily, every jailbroken iPhone gets a program called ‘Cydia’, which is an app store for jailbroken apps. Some stuff costs money, but most of them (95%) are free!

Why?

So now that we are over that, let’s talk about why I jailbroke my iPhone. I personally did it for 5 reasons: (1) folders!, (2) notifications, (3) video recording, (4) theme customization, and (5) easier settings adjustments [I will say that Apple did address the video recording feature with the new iPhone 3GS, but I’m not going to upgrade for that].

Video Recording

‘Cycorder’. Nuff said.

foldersFolders!

This is obvious. Why Apple didn’t build this into the system, I have no idea. As any iPhone owner is aware, one of the greatest features about the iPhone is all the apps that are available. There are thousands of them. The only downside is that the more apps you have, the more space they take up on the screen. Before I jailbroke my iPhone, I had up to 10 windows that I had to scroll through to find the app I was looking for. Now I only have two windows (I got rid of 3 windows by simply creating a “games” folder). The app I use for folders is called ‘categories’. It’s an easy to use folder creator that even let’s you choose from a library of icons.

notificationsNotifications

This is probably the biggest time saver for me. In order to see if you missed a phone call, received an email, or got a text message, you have to unlock your phone, possibly type in a password, and look in various places. This is a little ridiculous if you ask me. With a jailbreak iPhone, you can download an app called ‘StatusNotifier’ which displays little icons next to your battery status. Even on your lockscreen! Duh!

customizationTheme Customization

Who doesn’t enjoy customizing their wallpaper, right? Well, with ‘Winterboard’, you can do a lot more than that. I won’t go into all the details, but what I love the most is changing the wallpaper, customizing the look of the dock, and getting rid of all the text below the buttons. The possibilities are endless.

settingsEasier Settings Adjustments

In the same way ‘StatusNotifier’ saves time, so does ‘SBSettings’. With the flick of your finger, a little window appears that lets you turn on and off wifi, 3G,  location services, and much much more. And just like ‘StatusNotifier’, this can all be done from the lockscreen. AMAZING!

Are those reasons enough? If so, now comes the fun and easy part…

How?

This takes about 5 minutes, but I would set aside an hour because that’s how long you will want to play with your phone once you’re done ;-)

Visit this link to start: https://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=2311

I have an iPhone 3G and a Mac, so I downloaded RedSn0w to jailbreak, which I hear is the easiest way to do it. Basically, you download RedSn0w and the latest OS release for the iPhone (currently version 3.0). Then you run RedSn0w, follow the easy-to-follow directions, and 5 minutes later you’re done. Don’t worry, the link above will walk you through all the details.

Check out this little video…