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I couldn’t resist any longer: the recent exceptions added to the DMCA for jailbreaking allowed for the return of jailbreakme.com, the easiest way yet to jailbreak your iPhone. Just about every podcast I listen to/watch had talked about this and demoed it live so I figured what the heck? I made a full backup of my iPhone 3GS with iTunes and then fired up Safari …

A simple slide of my finger, and it was done:

As you can see from the screenshots, it only took 3 minutes to complete the entire process. I now had the Cydia app store on my device, which opens up a whole new world of applications for the iPhone. These apps aren’t approved by Apple, so they don’t have to follow Apple’s design guidelines and limits on functionality/features.  Just like the App Store, there are free and paid apps in the Cydia store.

One of the first apps I installed was SBSettings, which gives you shortcut access to some common settings. This is a much faster way to turn on/off the different radios rather than having to navigate through the normal Settings app. You can assign different actions (via another cool app, Activator) to bring up SBSettings like swiping the status bar, or doing a short press of the Home button (which is what I use). Also notice in the screenshot to the left that I’ve got 5 icons in my dock! Currently, SBSettings (plus Activator) is the single-most useful thing I’ve installed on my iPhone since jailbreaking.

Another reason people jailbreak is for theming, they want the phone’s interface to look the way they want it, not the way Steve Jobs wants it. For this, you can use Winterboard (which is the newer replacement for Summerboard, which was a play on the Apple’s springboard (the main pages containing the icons of your apps)). Once you have Winterboard installed, you have the daunting task of searching though thousands of user-created themes for your iPhone. Winterboard lets you mix-and-match themes via a priority screen where you order which parts of a theme should override another. It’s a bit confusing at first, and every change requires a quick “respring” (basically a restart of the springboard) which makes it time consuming, but eventually you can get the phone to look just the way you want. After experimenting with different themes, I decided I like the original, uniform look. Plus, with iOS4 you can set your separate lock screen and springboard wallpapers anyway. I did use it to “hide” the text beneath them (it’s supposed to be hidden but apparently the text is just changed to black so it still appears in the dock reflection, which could be turned off as well), change my icon text from gray to white, and also changed my e-mail and SMS notification sounds. To further customize my springboard, I installed Rename II so I could actually change the text of my icons. No more long name icons with the annoying “…” in the middle!

Something else you can do once your iPhone is jailbroken is tether it to your laptop using apps like PDANet or MyWi. This is sort of a gray area since even though you may have the grandfathered unlimited data plan with AT&T, the carrier currently charges extra for the tethering “service.” I gave PDANet a quick try and was able to surf the internet on my EeePC using my iPhone’s 3G data connection. Speedtest.net clocked my connection at about 1.3Mbps, which isn’t too bad.

Ramping up the nerd factor to 11, why not have command-line access to your iPhone? Installing OpenSSH gives you the ability to copy files to and from the phone and connect to it like any other Linux-based device. If you do this, be sure to change the root password! You might also want to use the SBSettings plugin to quickly switch OpenSSH on and off when you need it. I had to use this because while playing with Cydia I accidentally misspelled a package source address which was causing errors. I was able to connect to my phone with WinSCP, download the files I needed to change, edited them on my PC (there isn’t a text editor available via the iPhone’s command-line), and then copied them back onto the phone.

I was apprehensive at first about jailbreaking my phone, but I have to admit that after just a few days I am already pretty happy that I did so, if only just to play around with some of the cool apps people have developed. I’ve only had one strange crash that occurred while I was removing an app, but other than that I haven’t noticed any performance or stability issues. At first I thought my battery was draining faster, but I think that was just because I was using the phone more than usual as I played around with apps and themes. I’ll have to keep an eye on that once I’m back in my normal usage cycle. Finally, I’ve had no problem continuing to use my iPhone with iTunes for syncing, backups, using the App Store, etc. All-in-all, it’s been a pretty satisfying experience. It’s definitely not for everyone, but if you’re a tinkerer like me, it can be fun.

One final note: jailbreakme.com is taking advantage of a PDF security exploit in Safari in order to gain root access to the phone for the jailbreak process. Apple says they will fix this hole soon. In the meantime, if you want to protect your (jailbroken) phone from potentially malicious PDF attacks, you can install the PDF Loading Warner from Cydia.