The Voice of Reason

Ah, jailbreaking. That great iPhone adventure that starts with the timidness of breaking free of Apple’s control and ends with the excitement of taking full advantage of your powerful (and expensive!) device. At one time, there was a debate about the legality of jailbreaking. Apple wanted it to be illegal under the DMCA and consumers wanted the freedom to do what they wish with devices they have purchased. Well, in the end, the consumers won and jailbreaking continues on as it always has.

For those new to the jailbreaking scene, what follows is a list of some of the best apps available for jailbroken iPhone and iPod Touch devices. For more information on jailbreaking, search Google with your device and firmware version. Generally, if you have a 3.x firmware, blackra1n should work for you and if you have a 4.x firmware (excluding >4.0.1), http://jailbreakme.com should be your method of choice.

Without further delay, let’s take a look at some fantastic apps:

1. Infiniboard
   • Infiniboard is aptly named. It allows for vertical scrolling and pagination for a virtually unlimited number of applications per springboard page. Want to group all your News apps together, social apps together, etc. but can’t do it with only 16 icons? Infiniboard quickly and neatly solves this problem.
2. Infinifolders
   • Similar to Infiniboard, this app allows iOS 4 folders to go to infinity. Infinifolders bypasses Apple’s limitation of 12 apps in a single iOS 4 folder and allows you to place as many apps inside a folder as you desire. You can even choose the color of the scroll bar and paginate the folder. However, be careful and do not place a folder inside a folder. This is not yet a supported feature and may crash your iPhone.
3. Infinidock
   • Infinidock is to the dock what Infinifolders is to the folder. With this app, you can horizontally scroll the iPhone’s dock and have as many apps in the dock as your wish.
4. Intelliscreen
   • IntelliScreen is one of the best jailbreak apps that provides functionality most would expect by default on their iPhone. IntelliScreen brings your calendar, e-mail, news, sports, weather and text messages to the “Slide to Unlock” Screen. At $9.99, it’s a little pricey but trust me, it’s well worth the money.
5. SBSettings
   • Provides you with an instant access to settings that disable and enable services like Wi-Fi and GPS. SBSettings is a customizable launcher that overlays a menu containing basic functions of the system “options” menus. To get the menu, swipe the bar at the top of the screen with the time. It’s that easy! Additionally, it contains items like Reboot, Respring, 3G, Wi-Fi, and other switches to turn features on and off. Again, this is functionality that should be available by default on the iPhone.
6. MyWi 4.0
   • This app allows you to create a WiFi HotSpot to share your 3G connection with other PCs and devices. Essentialy, MyWi turns your iPhone into a WiFi router. MyWi has been rebuilt from scratch to bring tethering support to iOS 4 and will work with all jailbroken iPhones. As AT&T’s tethering option is $45 per month, MiWi 4.0 priced at just $19.99 pays for itself in about 2 weeks.
7. My3G
   • Simply put, it makes apps believe that they are on WiFi instead of 3G. What does this mean? No more limits on downloading app size and you can make and take FaceTime calls from anywhere with the iPhone 4. With My3G, you can also watch high definition YouTube videos, use Skype or Fring or other VOIP apps over the 3G network.
8. biteSMS
   • This is a great replacement for the built-in Apple SMS app and has lots of features including smileys, Quick reply, Quick Compose, privacy, scheduled SMS, passcode lock, delivery reports, signatures comes loaded with biteSMS. No longer do you need to exit apps to read or respond to a SMS. This is the way SMS/MMS should have been with the iPhone. Also check out iRealSMS, the competitor to this comprehensive message suite.
9. Emulators
   • NES, Genesis (soon to be in the App Store but the jailbreak app lets you use your own ROMs), SNES, Nintendo 64. They’re all here and ready to play your favorite games. Instead of just being limited to the games available in the App Store, you can load of ROMs of the favorite games from years past. Imagine being able to play old favorites like The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, Metroid, Mario Kart or a host of other games while waiting for a flight or just sitting at home. Great games from platforms past made available on platforms of today.
10. Winterboard
    • Theme program that allows you to change the look and feel of the iPhone. A multitude of free themes are available on Cydia including everything from retro design to modern to movie-based to Picasso-based. The possibilities are endless. Additionally, for those ambitious souls, you can even create your own theme to make the iPhone even more personalized to you.
11. Lockdown Pro
    • This is a simple yet powerful app that allows you to lock individual applications. Need to loan your phone to someone but want to be sure they can’t read those text messages you sent to your boyfriend or girlfriend last night? Lockdown Pro is for you. When the user attempts to run a locked application, he/she will be prompted for a password. This can happen every time or, for your convenience, only the first time a locked app is launched. In the latter scenario, locking the phone also relocks the individual applications.
12. Cylay
    • Anti-theft and tracking software for the iPhone. See my previously published full review of Cylay.

Of course, this is but a small sampling of the apps available to expand the capabiities of iPhone once it’s jailbroken. If you know of a great jailbreak app that wasn’t mentioned in this article, please tell about it in the comments!

Thanks for reading and Happy iPhone-ing!

See even more apps in part 2 of my jailbreak roundup

Filed under: Apple iOS, Personal/Life, Reviews, Technology |