After I broke my last phone, I decided to man up and got myself an iPhone as a replacement. I’ve installed a couple of apps from the official appstore and have pretty much installed everything that has caught my attention.

I came across a post on Gizmodo with a guide on how to jailbreak your iPhone. It was quite an easy process, after I got myself familiar with the sequence of buttons to press during the breaking process, and I can now enjoy a few more apps that are not available in the appstore.

You should jailbreak your iPhone or iPod if you want to install really cool and useful applications that are not in the iTunes App Store. Many of these apps are a complete must for any iPhone user but are not allowed by Apple in their iTunes App Store.

This is what you can do with a phone that has been jailbroken:

• Use your iPhone as a 3G modem with your laptop.
• Record video using Cycorder.
• Unlock your iPhone installing a simple program, so you can use a pre-paid card when you go out on vacation instead of paying outrageous roaming charges.
• Follow speech turn-by-turn directions in a GPS program.
• Copy and paste (yes, copy and paste).
• Play Nintendo Entertainment System games and other emulated classic cames (like Monkey Island!)

Something obvious that has always been a bridge for developers to cross is “Why do it for free, when I can make money?”. This has lead to “lite” versions of most apps in the appstore being available for free. The lite version is of course exactly what the name says, a watered down, featureless lite version of the full app which you should pay for. This is a good model for the “try before you buy” method of doing things, and I have gone from lite to full versions on a couple of apps.

The jailbreaking process is managed through an app called “QuickPwn“. It’s a GUI step based tool that makes this a pretty simple process. As I said before, if you are going to be doing this, be sure to read one step ahead when being told which buttons to press as I messed this up first time around :/

A big pull in jailbreaking your iPhone is getting access to other repositories of applications outside of the control of Apple. This has lead to the development of a couple of must have apps as detailed above. Until now, these apps have been free but with the latest verion of Cydia, developers not submitting their apps to the official appstore can now opt to attach a price tag to their work.

Well it is officially open. Just to test it out I decided to pick up the first paid Cydia App: Cyntact. The first thing you will notice after installing the new Cydia is Cyntact up there in changes. You’ll also notice that the title and description is in the color blue instead of black like normal applications
. This blue color indicated that it is a Cydia Store Application. That is the only difference you will see in the new Cydia as nothing else menu-wise has changed. [modmyi]

The other alternative to Cydia is Installer. You can browse the same content with both, but installing some apps only works on Cydia (xGPS). First thing you might want to do after getting Installer up and running, is adding a couple more sources to the repository list.

Installer 4.0 Sources

- RiP Dev – http://i.ripdev.com/
- Big Boss – http://apptapp.thebigboss.org/repofiles/installer4/
- iSpazio – http://repo.neolinus.org/ispazio/
- Ste Packaging – http://repo.smxy.org/installer4/
- ModMyiFone – http://i.modmyifone.com/
- iPhone-Notes – http://i.iphone-storage.de/ [installerapps]

You now have the ability to customise your iPhone to levels the appstore could not offer.

If you guys have found some cool apps in either the official appstore or through Cydia/Installer, be sure to let us know so we can try them out for ourselves.

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