Last week the Chronic Dev Team published the untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.1.1 by releasing the jailbreak tool “Absinthe 2.0”. Since I have an iPhone 4s which is running iOS 5.1.1 I was waiting for an untethered jailbreak for this combo. For the people that are not tech savvy, here’s an explanation of this terminology.
An “untethered” jailbreak has the property that if the user turns the device off and back on, the device will start up completely, and it will have a patched kernel — in other words, it will be jailbroken after each reboot.
With a “tethered” jailbreak, if the device starts back up on its own, it will no longer have a patched kernel, and it may get stuck in a partially started state; in order for it to start completely and with a patched kernel, the user has to start it with the help of the jailbreaking tool.
Wikipedia & Google are your best friends 😛 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_jailbreaking for more information about jailbreaking.
As the definition states, with an untethered jailbreak you can restart the iDevice [Wiki] without the need of an external tool and the iDevice is still jailbroken. This can be very handy if you need to completely switch off your iDevice for some reason. So I downloaded Absinthe and jailbreaking was a piece of cake (you can find the tool here). Just followed the steps on that page and within 30 minutes my iPhone 4s was jailbroken.
Now you might be wondering why someone would want to jailbreak their iDevice. Well, for the simple reason of being able to expand the feature set limited by Apple and its App Store. The main reason for jailbreaking is that you can install apps to personalize & customize your iDevice to your liking! For the majority of iDevice users iOS might be fine and peachy but I miss a few things in iOS that I liked in Android. Anyway, these were reasons for me to jailbreak my iPhone 4s, they might sound weird to you but that’s just me 😛
- Toggles to quickly switch things like Wifi, Bluetooth etc on and off without having to go into several menu’s
- Widgets, like the HTC Weather Clock widget on a homescreen
- Placing & removing icons where I want them
- Removing that damn Spotlight screen! Seriously … a whole damn page for search?
- Customizing my notification center
- Customizing my lock screen
So after jailbreaking and fiddling around in Cydia I have my iPhone 4s the way I like it … for now. 😛 I might tweak some more but this is to my personal liking at the moment. To give you an idea of how iOS looks on my iPhone 4s here’s some screenshots. Nothing to drastic or over the top I think but just tweaked enough to my liking. Hey I’m a gadget nerd … so sue me.
From left to right:
- Lock screen
- Notification center
- Home screen
- Second screen