Jailbreaking your iPhone 3G (or iTouch.)

Personal

I’ve had my iPhone 3G since September, and for months I had been reading articles on jailbreaking the iPhone. It felt like so much work when reading through all of the articles found, but the process was so easy and quick. Since I’m using a Windows machine, I went ahead and decided to use QuickPWN to jailbreak my phone. If you’re using a Mac, you’ll want to Pwnage.

img_0028 It’s not really pertinent to include the steps of what I did with Quickpwn. It was a matter of plugging the iPhone into the USB port, and letting the software recognize the phone. Then you just follow the instructions listed (holding the power button a few seconds, then power+home, then home), and voila, it boots up with your jailbroken iPhone.

You’ll want to backup just in case something goes awry during the process. However, I had no problems at all. Apps, contacts, and all files stayed in tact and no corruption. The main purpose for doing this was because I wanted to take advantage of a bunch of apps that are available through Cydia. Installer.app is included as well, but I prefer what is offered through Cydia at the moment.

img_0033 One thing I would recommend before you download any app on your device, is that you google it online. I didn’t do this, and had some issues that I can’t resolve unless I restore my iPhone. There are some that are going to be buggy, and might not work entirely as it should, and there are some that are going to interfere with other apps that may be loaded as well. One website/forum I have been relying on heavily to find out any issues or recommendations has been modmyi.com which has a bunch of mods for iPhone, iPod, Mac and who knows what else. They are also very involved with apps through Cydia, so there is definitely a chance you can get help for something, or even request an app.

One app that I would stay away is called Kate (RiPDev). Prior to configuring i I went to make a call only to have the mobilephone.app crash on me after 5 seconds of loading. It kept doing this repeatedly since at first I though it was a bad jailbreak, but then I remember I installed Kate. So I went to remove the app, only to still have to problem. Perplexed, I added it back. I then went and googled mobilephone.app, and one of the first results was from modmyi.com: mobilephone.app crash. Someone mentioned that Kate was the culprit on their phone and provided suggestions on how to remove it.

I’ve been through a bunch of threads and have been unsuccessful at this point. Granted, I did get mobilephone.app working once I applied a trial license to Kate. However, once that trial expires you receive no warning and then you better get used to things crashing again. I’ve tried a few of the fixes to undo Kate’s fuckup, but none of them worked, and I didn’t want to resort to restoring. So I went ahead and just purchase a license for it, but don’t go through the trouble I did. Just stay away from it altogether.

img_0030 Granted, the largest advantage of having Kate installed was being able to modify a lot of settings on the phone (but I should mention that there are certains apps that will achieve various effects–you just need to search for their names to get ’em.) But with Kate you can have 5 icons in your dock (there’s another app that can do this, but I don’t know it off hand), change the icons used for a good portion of apps, add privacy settings (eg: no content shown when a text message is received), and a bunch of others I have yet to take advantage of. So if you are interested in paying for the app, there is a chance is will be of value to you. Otherwise you get a short trial (I think a week) so if you don’t want to pay for it, skip out on it.

Some of the other apps I have downloaded and enjoy:

10 Comments

  1. Damn you for making me want an iPhone all over again. I only just got over the real ‘want’ for it, and now you’ve relapsed me. DAMN YOU!!!!!

  2. I wish themes would come to the app store, although they might have to change the name of the store. I’d love to be able to change my icons and have my background behind my icons. I’ve tried jailbreaking my phone before and something went wonky and it scared me away from doing it ever again.

  3. Pam, that was my biggest concern… something going wrong. And then finally I decided to go ahead and go with it. I haven’t really gone through the process for it on a Mac, but the Windows jailbreaking took less than 10 minutes, I think even less than that.

    If you ever want to do it again, I say go for it. The worst that happens is you have to restore from a backup :

  4. I want an iPhone so I can experiment with all these!

    But alas, I think I have to wait a long time for this dream to come true 🙁

  7. I’ve had my iPhone jailbroken since I got it last March or so. I’ve always used Kate(formally known as Catepillar) and I’ve never really had any problems out of it. I think just some people have issues with it based on other things they have installed.

    And you really shouldn’t be worried about jailbreaking cause you literally can’t do any permanent damage to your phone. All it takes is a simple restore and bam, solved.

  8. Kate is certainly not the best app and definitely has a lot of flaws. The main being that there is no warning that you have no license attached, so you won’t receive functionality with it which ends up causing the phone.app to crash constantly. Not only that but when you sign up to use the trial, there is no notification that your license is expired, which leads to certain [default] apps crashing.

    I had no way to fix the damage caused by Kate unless I were to restore the phone. My trial expired, and even though I disabled all settings, and then uninstalled… My phone app was still crashing. I had two choices: restore, or buy the damn license. I bought the unlimited license since it was on sale for $20.

    There ARE issues with incompatibility with other apps, but this problem was consistent with standard iPhone apps, and not 3rd party apps.

    And you actually can cause issues with a jailbroken phone… Not necessarily jailbreaking itself, although I have read about corrupt jailbreaks happening and having to restore the phone in order to continue.

  9. My husband has an unlock Iphone on T-mobile. It is pretty sweet but I really don’t care to much for the Iphone. I love my G1. All the great features and a full keyboard. I like being able to really touch buttons when I txt. 🙂 Dork I am.

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