iPhone 3GS, released on appeal
Well I jailbroke my 3GS. Turns out I grossly misunderstood the jailbreaking process. The unlock I thought was a jailbreak was in fact just an unlock so that non-AT&T customers could use their iPhones with other carriers. Dev Team was waiting until the 3.1 firmware release to put out their jailbreak so they could see what Apple would do. George Hotz, apparently the original iPhone hacker, came out of retirement to tell them he wasn’t having any of that. He has released a 3GS jailbreak for 3.0 firmware called purplera1n. Please note, this is only for the 3GS as far as I know.
Keep reading for my simple instructions on jailbreaking.
Anyways it is dead simple to do so rather than link you to another site for instructions here they are:
- Plug your iPhone into your computer
- Download and run purlera1n from the link above
- Click the button _(there is only one button so _don’t ask me which one)
- Your iPhone will reset and show a picture of some dude having a romantic walk in the rain with a giant iPhone (apparently it’s Hotz)
- After restart, start the new app you have called “freeze” it will give you again, one button to “install Cydia”
- At this point I unplugged it from my P.C., for some reason first go round Cydia’s download hung on me, anyways no big deal you can start from step one again without any trouble.
- Once Cydia is downloaded you can start getting jailbroken apps from Cydia. Not all of them work on the 3GS yet so keep that in mind.
This is not for everyone, if you are having some troubles with it I’d be happy to try to help you if you post a comment here, but a good place to ask is www.iphoneincanada.ca in their forums. They also have an entire forum dedicated to jailbreaking and the Cydia apps. Good luck ;-) Update: So far so good on all fronts. I had a moment where my 3G was connected but not working, a quick restart and it was fixed. I have VoipOver3G installed now and I can confirm it works as advertised, it is possible to make Skype calls over the 3G network (take that Rogers!). For anyone wondering if jailbreaking is worth the hassle I have two things to say: First, it isn’t much of a hassle, second, Cydia provides more apps then probably even the app store has and many which provide functionality not available on any app store app (themes for your phone would be a good example). So, if you don’t care for the hassle of 5 minutes spent jailbreaking and you are happy being limited to what Apple says you can install, then no, it isn’t worth it.