Do you think that “jailbreaking” my iPhone is a good idea? I have spent some time reading up on it and feel that I am ready to give it a shot.
Before the 2.0 software and the App Store, I definitely did have my first iPhone jailbroken, and thought that the phone was not nearly as useful without those extra features.
Since iPhone 2.0, and especially since they cleaned up and stabilized everything with 2.1, I haven’t had a super-compelling reason to hack (jailbreak) my phone. I do often miss the features — call logs, Qik, SMS mailing or export — that were available in the jailbreaking. and which Apple has not deigned to allow its officially sanctioned apps to offer. Stinkers.
That said, I got burned early on with jailbreaking, when I had to run an update, or had to troubleshoot by restoring the phone, and then I lost all of the data — notes, video recordings, or even game levels — that I might have created with a jailbroken app. So I’ve just learned to live without, and keep hoping that one day, Apple will open up and let some of those great ideas in.
Now, with all of THAT said, I have in fact jailbroken a 2.1 iPhone. I had given my daughter my original iPhone without a SIM card, for her to use as an iPod touch. Worked great… until I updated it to firmware 2.1, at which point the phone deactivated itself. You shoulda seen the look on her face when I told her the next day, “Honey, I temporarily broke your iPhone.” It took me several failed attempts of using the jailbreaking tool Pwnage, and finally using the same group’s QuickPwn in a Windows virtual machine in VMWare Fusion, to get the dang thing unlocked, but I did it, and it works fine. It’ll be the same battle if I ever want to upgrade it to 2.2, and so on. You can see why I haven’t done the same with my own phone, or if my kid were a teenager who actually used it as a mobile phone; I’d hate for either of us to be without a phone for any length of time.
(Side note: Now you’ve inspired me to google “iphone call log”, and find things like this, but it’s going to take me just a little bit of time to figure out how to use it. It appears to be only for those who are comfortable playing in Unix & AppleScript, but it’s only a matter of time before someone writes a GUI application to take care of it.)
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