Tutorial: Jail breaking your iPhone

If you have an iPhone, you own one of the most useful communication devices anno 2009. When it first arrived, it revolutionized the mobile industry. Finally, there was a successful combination of a PDA and a telephone.

When I got my hands on the iPhone, I had spent more than a decade to find a tool that would give me all I wanted. Back in the 1990s, I used a Palm Pilot, traded it up to the Palm m505 with color screen, and loved the ease of use. I did hate two things - it´s lack of a phone meant I had to carry with me two devices, and no WIFI/Internet meant I had to couple it with my computer to sync it.

Later came the Nokia, and the Sony Ericsson mobile phones with PDA and e-mail built in. These devices sucked as phones, and was truly bad as PDA´s. I loathed them. The only good thing was I could now - when I was lucky - sync over the GSM network. I soon ended up using them as phones only.

I never tried the Blackberry, as it was not available in Norway until too late. Perhaps that one would have convinced me.

Today, there is but one alternative. That is the iPhone. It is so amazingly easy to connect it to whatever tool I need - including gmail, my calendars, CRM, GeoCaching (a fun localization game), Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. What is more, when I need something, the chance of finding it in the App store is pretty huge. I use traveling tools from Lonely planet, I use Flight Track Pro, and I use the CIA World Fact book. And a bunch of other apps too.

But.

Even the iPhone comes with limitations. One of those is that it usually comes locked to your carrier. This is fine if you do not travel to foreign countries a lot, and if you do travel, avoid using the GSM network to download your mail and other data. My challenge is that I do travel much, and I do use the GSM network locally to download maps, information, mail and whatever. This quickly becomes very expensive since Data roaming is not regulated yet. My solution is to use local prepaid cards for my iPhone. And this in turn requires me to unlock it.

Another limitation is Apples decision to control everything that I should be able to install on my iPhone. Yes, most tools are now available in the Appstore. But not everything. And to get access to these not-approved apps, you need to jail breake your phone. Doing so gives you more control over your iPhone, including setting themes, turning on or off services that you do not like, avoid sending privacy information to the application developers and much more.

A very nice tutorial on how to jailbreak, and how to unlock your iPhone here!