Recently I
finally caved and gave the uber-simple Jailbreak tool called “RedSn0w” a try.
Jailbreaking the iPhone 4S isn’t really that hard—it’s all a matter of
procedure and correct order of steps. It’s pretty simple, and once you figure
it out, it takes well under an hour to go from bone-stock to a fully tweakable
jailbreak.
What isn’t simple is Cydia, which is the “app
store” of the jailbroken world. A user gets Cydia for free when they use
RedSn0w or Absinthe to jailbreak their i-device. There are hundreds of tweaks,
apps, and theme managers from Cydia and its sources. All these goodies come
from source servers on the internet. While Cydia has it’s own clean sources,
there are literally hundreds of other source domains online for tweaks, themes, apps,
etc. Keep in mind that not all sources are good—be warned, malware is out there
too. To start things off I got a reputable theme manager to mix things up in
the aesthetic department on my phone.
Dreamboard seemed to be a popular
theme manager, so I ran with it
Within moments of installing Dreamboard my phone looked
exactly like an Android, complete with working clock, weather, and Facebook
widgets. Things could be confusing at times, but thanks to Dreamboard it was
extremely easy to swap back to the stock look as necessary. I will say that
Dreamboard definitely made swapping and trying themes easy as pie--and fast too.
Despite the
uber-slick theme swapping that Dreamboard provided, I found myself bouncing
back and forth between feeling bored, and overwhelmed by all the aspects of
jailbreaking. There’s a thousands of tweaks, and themes all from hundreds of
different sources. But each source must be manually added into Cydia, and then
manually sorted through. Going through the sources is a drag as the search feature
is horribly ineffective unless you know exactly what you are looking for. The
rating system is a joke, so browsing the app/tweak/theme lists tells the user
next to nothing about the quality of the download.
Using
Google and YouTube helps you quickly find the best tweaks and so on.
Installing them comes at multiple costs though—some installs cost money (more on
this in a moment), and all the cool goodies take system resources. In short, lots
of installs will almost certainly make the iPhone run slower than stock. Even I
noticed a little performance loss with minimal goodies installed.
There were
two more final straws that made me go back to stock. First were the ads. Cydia
has ads on nearly every page. That wasn’t appealing at all…every tweak and
theme listing in Cydia had 2-4 ads on the info page, and it took time to load
them all in addition to the screen shots. At best, they were annoying, and
detrimental to the load speeds in Cydia when browsing.
Secondly,
many of the cool tweaks, apps, and themes cost money. It would seem that “out
of jail” everything has a price—and no accountability. Purchases on Cydia can range
up to $15 for a theme. Many themes
are $2-$3 each, and other tweaks all cost a pretty penny once added up. (And
they’re not always bug-free either. Getting them to work properly can take some
additional tweaking). Installing a few top tweaks could easily run
$10-$20. A friend of mine who had done a jailbreak ended up with a couple of
unintentional bills due to hidden subscription fees after purchasing a couple
of different items.
In the end,
jailbreaking is pretty simple and easy—but living with it, and taking full
advantage of it is not. If you’re obsessed with your phone, and have lots of
time to tweak it and get into it, then jailbreaking might be for you. Also, if
you have a few specific themes in mind that you just have to have, then it may be worth a shot.
On the
other hand, if you’re not that into
your phone then jailbreaking is pretty overrated in my opinion. The possibility
of bricking a phone, or messing something up and dealing with the voided
warranty isn’t really worth the tweaks in my opinion. It’s cool, but it’s not
that cool. I’m happy to wait in jail for iOS 6.
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