Semi-Tethered iOS 5 Jailbreak Beta Released by BigBoss

What is the state of the iOS 5 jailbreak? Currently a tethered jailbreak is available by using redsn0w. A tethered jailbreak means if you run out of battery or reboot your iPhone, you’ll need to connect to Mac/PC to ‘boot’ your phone again to make it usable, whereas an untethered jailbreak is the opposite.

BigBoss has announced the release of his beta semi-untethered jailbreak for iOS 5. For existing tethered jailbroken iPhones on iOS 5, this semi-tethered jailbreak will allow the following:

1) Can use phone, sms (text messages)
2) Can use every other stock app on iphone.
3) Cannot use mobile safari
4) Can use other appstore web browsers such as atomic web browser
5) Cannot use mail app. You could install a gmail app from appstore or such instead.
6) You cannot use any jailbreak tweak, app, cydia until you boot tethered.
7) While in the semitether booted state, you should not add a jailbreak ios5 notification such as sbsettings to notifications during this state or your device will be stuck in a respring loop until you get home to “boot tethered”.

There are some limitations also noted by BigBoss:

1) The device will take longer to boot up. When you reboot, it has to reload every service. It will respring a couple times also.
2) According to Saurik, there are some “problems” to reloading all daemons on the fly. This is why mobile substrate installation requires “reboot device” in cydia. I have not experienced any of these problems, but I am not promising they do not exist. This is why we will need testing to see which problems may occur.

If you want to test out this semi-untethered jailbreak, you can install it by adding the following repo to Cydia:

http://thebigboss.org/semitether

Make sure you’re a near a computer when you test this, as you’ll have to reboot to see if works. If you’re desperate for a jailbreak for iOS 5, this semi-untether by BigBoss is positive news while we wait for an untethered jailbreak in the meantime.

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