iPod touch, iPhone and jailbreaking
Recently I succumbed to my gadget-addiction and got a iPod touch. I could restrain myself from buying an iPhone thanks to the ridiculous tariffs here.
Anyway, life was great and I was happy. I even bought the 20$ addon pack with the improved applications and the multipage home screen.
Then I read lots about the jailbreaking and that it was so easy to get good third party apps on my device, so I gave it a try.
First, I tried the Ziphone unlock, because “It’s so easy a caveman could do it!”. Well, a stone age cave man certainly would know what to do with the iBrick I had after trying this program. I, however, restored itto non-jailbroken pristine condition after approximately 10 minutes of cursing and freaking out.
An unfortunate combination of reinstalling my computer from scratch without using time machine and resetting the iTouch also led to the situation where I thought I had lost the 20$ app pack for good. Fortunately, Apple support was kind enough to allow me to download it again…
Anyway, after this desaster I tried the other simple jailbreak: PwnageTool. This works by running the jailbreak not on the device itself, but by modifying the firmware:
- Get the original firmware (direct links via TUAW)
- Prepare the device to accept the modified firmware (single click “iPwner” in the PwnageTool)
- Let the PwnageTool modify the firmware (you can even set some custom options for the iPhone) and get a coffee, this may take some time
- Load the modified firmware onto the device (option click restore to get the selection dialog)
- Done. Enjoy the glory of Installer.app and try to create something like this: iPhone ad song