Jailbreaking 101

Many users want to have a more fulfilling experience with their iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. Sure the current OS is quite good (3.1.3 and 3.2 respectively), but what do you do if you fancy yourself more of a power user?

Here is my tutorial for Jailbreaking your i-Device. It’s very straight forward. A few mouse clicks and you’re ready to explore the jailbroken side of your device.

So where do we begin?

First step is to make sure you are up to date. Now mind you, the only people who should update their phones to 3.1.3 are those that wish to unlock their carrier to use with overseas or domestic carriers with SIM cards. I’ll get into that in a moment.

Have AT&T and are fine with that carrier? OK, proceed.

1. Download the latest iTunes, either from the site or if you already have iTunes, make sure its updated through Apple’s Software Update
2. Plug you device into the USB cable and allow iTunes to back it up. Once the back up is complete, you can go ahead and click on “Check for Updates”
3. If you have a valid update, go ahead and update the firmware. This may take a while depending on your Internet connection. ~300MB for the download.
4. Now that your device is updated, go ahead and download Spirit. This is the application we will use to jailbreak your device. You can find the downloads (PC, Linux and Mac) here.
5. Once downloaded, unzip the file and open it.
6. Double click the icon and you’ll get this super-simple app pop-up:



7. Press “Jailbreak” and sit back and wait. Once the Jailbreak process is complete, your device will reboot, and reconnect to iTunes. Upon completion, you’ll see a new icon called “Cydia”, it looks like this:
   
8. Tap on Cydia. It’ll connect to the Internet, load some updates automatically and close. Re-Open the app, at which time it will ask you what type of user you are, I select “Graphical” as the others don’t apply to me.

Done!

Pretty easy, yes? So now for those of you that need to use a different carrier, or are overseas. Currently the firmware on the iPhone (3G/3Gs) upgrades the baseband to 05.12.01, and at the time of writing this post, there is no unlock for it. Once available I’ll post that too. So for those users, please DO NOT upgrade the firmware to 3.1.3.

Little Note: This article is purely for educational purposes. Use at your own risk, I accept no responsibility to any damages, or anything else that may occur. Sorry, thought I’d get that out there.