5 Reasons Why I Jailbroke my iPhone

Yes. I finally took the plunge and jailbroke my phone. One reason why I took so long to do it was the fact that it’s quite an easy task to jailbreak an unlocked iPhone without the risk of losing anything existing on the phone. If you want to know how I got it done, just hop over to http://spiritjb.com/.

I’m actually known for my insistence of buying apps and games legitimately off App Store. And since don’t exactly own a tree that grows money, this involves countless visits to appshopper.com and using Bargain Bin to hunt for discounted and free apps. So no, a certain app in Hackulous isn’t the motivation for jailbreaking my iPhone. So the question is why did I finally do it?

1. SBSettings

This hack alone is worth jailbreaking the iPhone. The cool thing about SBSettings is the quick access to enable or disable some of the features and capabilities of the iPhone is a real productivity enhancer.

For the benefit of the international readers, yours truly resides in a city called Kuala Lumpur and here in this wonderful city, 3G connectivity SUCKS (and that’s putting it quite mildly too). OK. Perhaps I’m a little emotional there, but the stability of the 3G connection does get wonky most of the time. I would then need to disable and re-enable 3G back to sort of reset it to get back online.

Assuming Settings is on your home screen, you need to press_home-tap-tap-tap-wait-tap-press_home to get it done.

With SBSettings? All I need to do is swipe-tap-wait-tap-tap. That’s it!

The cool thing about SBSettings is that it can also be extended to provide quick toggles for other hacks and capabilities, such as auto-rotation and Veency

2. Veency

Have you ever had moments where you need to type a REALLY long SMS that includes typing URLs and a whole bunch of numbers? Well, I do sometimes, but that’s just me. With my old WinMo phone, I was able to easily type and send the SMS directly from my PC using an app called MyMobiler to control the phone remotely and use the mouse and keyboard as input devices. Pretty cool stuff.

With Veency, this was totally possible on the iPhone. It’s really just a VNC server running on the iPhone. But that’s the cool part too. VNC is an open standard and there are clients on all major platforms. No specialized desktop software is required to get it working, a very important point since I’m using Linux Mint on my primary work machine.

3. Backgrounder + ProSwitcher

I’ve to admit that I don’t actually use Backgrounder a lot for reasons that I’ve mentioned in my most recent post. However, when I do need to leave apps running in the background, Backgrounder is truly a lifesaver. I still do help out to maintain Techarp and regularly use the iRdesktop app to remotely access the TechARP’s server. But most of the time, I’d also be chatting with Adrian, the founder of the TechARP, on IM+ at the same time to update and check with him before doing anything major to the server. So it’s a real pain that I would need to exit and reactivate each of these two apps all the time. With Backgrounder, all I needed to do was to just press-hold the home button and voila, the running app is now “Backgrounding Enabled”! It was a simple as that!

PowerSwitcher on the other hand is a pretty nice implementation of Palm Pre’s task switcher for the iPhone. It’s basically a frontend to Backgrounder and provides you with a very nice interface to switch between the running apps. I highly recommend using PowerSwitcher along with Backgrounder.

4. Activator

Ever wish there were more buttons on the iPhone so that you can assign hot-keys to quickly activate certain apps? I definitely do. The double-press of the home button on the official iPhone is too limiting to fulfill my need to have a bunch of apps that I regularly use within a few quick press, tab or swipe. In comes Activator to save my day.

As its name suggest, Activator is a hack that allows you to quickly run an app or activate a system function by assigning it to a few activation options. Among those are the few buttons available on the iPhone, tap+gestures on the status bar, springboard and so on. Really cool.

Before activator, I could only assign double-pressing the home button to the Camera app which I regularly use. But now, I can also activate the iPod control by double-tapping the status bar, tap and swipe left on the status bar for Settings, tap and swipe down on the status bar to simulate pressing the home button. And much more!

5. Winterboard

Since the iPhone is jailbroken, why not make it look nicer too! That’s exactly why I decided to install and use Winterboard at the end. To be honest, there aren’t a lot of nice themes available in Cydia. But there are a few that really stands out. Suave is one of those themes that looks REALLY good and it even comes with a good bunch of custom icons that fits the look of the theme.

So there you go, the five main reasons why I jailbroke my iPhone. There are also other cool things that I’m able to do now with my iPhone, such as downloading files off Safari and Emails, and managing them via iFile, SSH-ing into the phone, and so on. But if you’re willing to part away with some cash to purchase apps and hacks that are available from Cydia, there’s quite a lot of cool stuff that you can do with your iPhone too! The possibilities are really endless once the iPhone is jailbroken!