Jailbreak! :)

I jailbroke an iPhone the other day.

A friend of mine just got his iPhone 3G fixed, and he wanted to me to jailbreak it for him. I've never done it before but I was confident I could do it. After many hours of reading discouraging reviews about people's iPhones going blank and never switching on, I decided to do it anyway.

Redsn0w seemed a good choice, it seemed relatively simple: plug in your iPhone, click a few buttons, wait a while, and viola! I downloaded redsn0w 0.9.2 because I think that was the most stable version. I wanted to use 0.9.5 and install iOS 4.1 beta but I thought I'd rather stick with something simpler. Besides, I couldn't find a place to download the exact iOS I needed. So I decided to go with downloading plain ol' 3.1.2 ipsw.

I thought I had to use iTunes 9 to do all of this but it turns out iTunes 10 still does the trick, despite it's disgusting new icon (bleh!). I was afraid that Apple disabled shift-clicking on the update button but I was relieved to see I could still load a downloaded ipsw.

Redsn0w is quite simple really. Load the ipsw, then it processes it. Plug in the iPhone, switch it off, click a button, hold down some buttons to get into some DFU mode or something, let it do it's thing, then after a painstaking length of time the jailbroken iPhone will now be ready to play around with :)

On the topic of Cydia, the little app that comes with jailbreaking an iPhone, we didn't seem to get it going correctly. Damn thing couldn't download half the stuff. I guess the repositories are down? Deprecated? On strike? Eaten? I don't know. Too lazy to find out at the moment but maybe some day I'll check it out.

Note to all people new to jailbreaking: be patient, and try not to throw your iPhone at your computer screen.

I should be studying now, but thanks for reading. Happy jailbreaking! :)