After jailbreaking the iPhone 3G, the thought was that I can now try out a lot of applications and run the risk of ultimately killing the device. That thought of the device hanging because of a rouge application malfunctioning or causing the system to misbehave is always there throughout my experiment.
I got a friend to jailbreak the iPhone 3G with version 2.2.1. The major difference visible immediately is an application called Cydia. This is the window to a new world beyond the iTunes Shop. Of course, there are other installers now available but Cydia is the best there is.
The standard iPhone does not have all the nicest and prettiest features, icons, colors and themes. Having the iPhone jailbroken allows the potential of dressing it up with what you need the device to do.
Winterboard is important if you want to redress your iPhone. There are many themes and icons available to customize your iPhone.
Now, the shocking discovery that the Springboard (SB) will go into a loop and give you the screen of death (the apple logo stays fixed with no change). It can happen when you continue to download and install apps like there’s no tomorrow.
It’s so tempting when you can download almost anything you want and there seems to be at least 100+ open slots for the 9 pages of SB you can use. However, to the least of our expectations, some of these apps are not well behaved and can cause SB to “hang” (I’ll spare you the technical details). Suffice to know that the iPhone does halt, it does hang!
At this time, one will start to panic. You can’t power off the device. You will have to do the hard reset by pressing power and home together and hold. Still that Apple logo refuse to budge away. The inevitable happens. You will have to RESTORE the iPhone. A sidebar for the geek as follows:
If you are a geek and knows enough about SSH, you can check out a number of websites that can suggest ways to go around this. If you are that geek, please make sure you go to a WiFi environment where you can have a static IP address applied. Otherwise, you can’t SSH into the iPhone if you can’t tell the IP address even when the iPhone is connected and this paragraph of advice is meaningless.
To restore the iPhone with the original OS (or the jailbreak OS), you will need to know how to put the iPhone into a Restore mode. When the iPhone is at the OFF mode, press the power and Home together and the moment the Apple logo appears, you keep holding the Home while you let go the power. Soon, you will see the Restore screen appearing with an instruction to plug the iPhone with the USB to iTune. Once you connect to the Notebook at this time, iTune will automatically load and prepare for a restore ONLY. Anyway, this is not supposed to be a tutorial, so please seek other websites for the step-by-step instructions.
(If you have the need to restore the device, you will have to experiment to jailbreak the device again!)
These are the joys and woes of jailbreaking the iPhone. The conclusion is simple:
If you can afford to jailbreak the device, by all means do it at your own risk and enjoy your device to the max!
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1 Comment
May 29, 2009 at 10:02 pm
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