Jailbreaking and Tethering with the iPhone

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I finally took the plunge and jailbroke my iPhone a couple of weeks ago. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of jailbreaking some explanation may be needed. Steve Jobs has decided that he wants Apple to approve all applications that you install on your iPhone. There are some advantages to this like blocking some particularly malicious applications. There are also some disadvantages because you may want to use an application that Jobs and company don’t want you to have. Jailbreaking will have the disadvantage that your phone will become less stable. So if you can’t deal with your phone crashing occasionally stop reading now.

Jailbreaking the iPhone installs some special software on the iPhone that allows you a second non-Apple application store. The special app that you are getting on the phone is called Cydia.

Installing Cydia is now very simple with a program called Spirit Jailbreak. You just need to:

1. download one of these two pieces of software to your computer:
   • Windows (here)
   • Mac OS X (here)
2. connect your iPhone to your computer
3. launch the software and press the “jailbreak” button

Rob Walsh of This Week in iPhone podcast has a great tutorial on this process: Spirit Jailbreak and Cydia Tutorial – OS 3.1.3 for iPhone and iPod Touch and 3.2 for iPad.

You will still be able to use the iPhone in all normal ways after you jailbreak including buying applications from the Apple approved app store in iTunes.

I had one particular program that I really wanted that finally got me to jailbreak and that is MyWi. This program when installed on my iPhone let’s me connect to the internet through the iPhone from my laptop. It basically turns my iPhone into the equivalent of the Verizon MyFi except of course that I am using my AT&T data plan. Now I only have an original iPhone so I have the AT&T edge service rather than the faster 3G service so I am not going to get the kind of connection where I will be watching shows from Hulu or anything else that is particularly data heavy. I also may be violating my AT&T terms of service just by trying this (but AT&T did promise this feature over a year ago). But still having some internet connection where I would otherwise have none can be quite useful. This will also drain your battery pretty darn fast.