Jailbreaking An Iphone - The Pros and Cons

Some of you may be wondering about jailbreaking an iphone 3/3GS/4 or ipod/ipad. In this hub i wont be telling you how to, but i will be giving you the pros and cons of jailbreaking. Firstly, and surprising to some, jailbreaking is perfectly legal since Apple lost the battle against it a couple of years ago. According to the higher power 'once an iphone is bought from Apple they are free to do as the want with it.' All the while Apple arguing for copyright.

The downside is you automatically void your warranty if anything goes wrong and the chances of that greatly increase if you dont know what you are doing. Many say you can cover yourself by simply unjailbreaking the device before taking it to Apple but that risk is all down to you. If the phone became unusable for example, you are left hundreds of pounds down without a fix.

Another downfall you open yourself up to is our friends the 'VIRUS.' With around 10,000 jailbroken iphones it leaves the market wide open to developers which are popping up all the time. With no restrictions at all, it goes without saying that at some point your going to get yourself in a sticky mess with one bug or another eating away at your microchip.

Now while jailbreaking is legal, not all the 'advantages' that come with it are! Downloading games and apps that are paid apps in Apples store is still very much illegal due to copyright. Places like 'cydia' and 'icy' being the main distributers for such, readily have most that are on the app store available for free with plenty of users taking advantage everyday.

With battery life being quite good on the iphone you may be unpleasantly surprised after jailbreaking your device, to see your battery level fall dramatically not just while using but also in STANDBY. A complaint you can see pretty much everywhere and anywhere online, from blogs and forums to youtube all searching for fixes to there battery drain issue. The worst case of battery drainage i heard was one guys battery life dropping right down to an hours talk time, sure his phone looked great and had some really cool gadgets installed thanks to the many developers around, but he couldn't use his phone so there wasn't really much point.

©2012 Ange .Ma'Bit. Bayliss all rights reserved

There must be some benefits i hear you cry....depending on what you want to do with your phone, there definitely is.

The first being all restrictions are lifted - good news if you're a developer in particular, but you don't need to be a developer to benefit. One of the biggest downfalls for Apple was the similarity of all their devices, not much changes throughout the iphone line; things get faster, screens get more clear etc but nothing really changes in the layout or look itself. With jailbreaking all of that disappears, your free to change all of your app icons, the theme throughout your menus, the look of your battery meter, your lock screen slide bar and even change the name of your network provider. All that is just the beginning, they go into customising the look of your phone further by giving you animations for swipe, animations for icons...you get the jist.

Alongside of all that modifying capability for your icons and animations, they bring in sounds to replace the standard sounds Apple give you and tweaks to boost the speed of which your device is able to run at usually without having iheart failure, making your phone or ipod super fast. As mentioned earlier, all these features will have a huge impact on your battery life.

Gone are the days where you can have up to 4 or 5 game folders because you cant fit them into one, you are now able to fit all of them into one folder and gone are the restrictions of 8 webpages open with yet another tweak solving that problem giving you unlimited windows to open at your hearts content.

The list of things you can do are endless but each tweak comes at your own risk. Having complete control is only ever a good thing when you know exactly what you are doing and when you see kids jailbreaking you have to kind of raise an eyebrow, i wonder how much they cost their parents?! A ten year old with complete control on every single file and directory that makes the iphone the iphone cant be a good thing. Having said that, all the information you need is all to readily available with a click of a button theres guides and tips at every corner telling you how you can 'modify' your phone to become the best thing since sliced bread.

Written by Ange 'Tidbit' Bayliss