I jailbroke an iPhone the other day.
A friend of mine just got his iPhone 3G fixed, and he wanted to me to jailbreak it for him. I’ve never done it before but I was confident I could do it. After many hours of reading discouraging reviews about people’s iPhones going blank and never switching on, I decided to do it anyway.
Redsn0w seemed a good choice, it seemed relatively simple: plug in your iPhone, click a few buttons, wait a while, and viola! I downloaded redsn0w 0.9.2 because I think that was the most stable version. I wanted to use 0.9.5 and install iOS 4.1 beta but I thought I’d rather stick with something simpler. Besides, I couldn’t find a place to download the exact iOS I needed. So I decided to go with downloading plain ol’ 3.1.2 ipsw.
I thought I had to use iTunes 9 to do all of this but it turns out iTunes 10 still does the trick, despite it’s disgusting new icon (bleh!). I was afraid that Apple disabled shift-clicking on the update button but I was relieved to see I could still load a downloaded ipsw.
Redsn0w is quite simple really. Load the ipsw, then it processes it. Plug in the iPhone, switch it off, click a button, hold down some buttons to get into some DFU mode or something, let it do it’s thing, then after a painstaking length of time the jailbroken iPhone will now be ready to play around with 
On the topic of Cydia, the little app that comes with jailbreaking an iPhone, we didn’t seem to get it going correctly. Damn thing couldn’t download half the stuff. I guess the repositories are down? Deprecated? On strike? Eaten? I don’t know. Too lazy to find out at the moment but maybe some day I’ll check it out.
Note to all people new to jailbreaking: be patient, and try not to throw your iPhone at your computer screen.
I should be studying now, but thanks for reading. Happy jailbreaking!
