Will You Jailbreak Your iDevice on iOS 5?

Last week’s keynote, brought the news that iOS 5 will be released to the public this Wednesday. iOS 5 brings over 200 new features to your iDevice. Many of these new features seem to be inspired by jailbreak tweaks and apps, so will you still need to jailbreak your iDevice after iOS 5 is released?

Well, the answer will be different for each individual.

First group of individuals who will definitely need to jailbreak, are the folks who need to have their iPhones unlocked, but do not own an officially unlocked iPhone. You will still need to jailbreak, preserving your baseband, and unlock via “ultarsn0w”. At this point, we’re still unsure if this is even possible, so you should not update to iOS 5, if you need your iPhone unlocked.

Another group of folks who will want to jailbreak iOS 5, are the people who like to customize the look of the OS. Apple has still not included the ability to apply “Themes”, like you can with Winterboard, or Dreamboard. This type of customization will probably never be available in iOS, as Apple is very proud of their design.

There are many new features coming in iOS 5, that have been available in the jailbreak community for a while. Custom SMS tones is a big one. iOS 5 allows you to use any sound on your device, as your SMS tones, and you can assign different tones to different contacts. This relieves us from the burden of replacing the stock tones, via Winterboard.

Notification Center is a very welcome update to notifications in iOS. There have been a few different apps in Cydia (the jailbreak App Store), to try and solve the outdated notification system in iOS. LockInfo, and definitely MobileNotifier seemed to be a direct influence on what is the current iOS 5 Notification Center.

One key feature, for me, that will keep me jailbreaking, is the ability to use FaceTime over 3G. The jailbreak app “3G Unrestrictor” allows this awesome feature, while Apple (or prehaps the carriers) do not. Depending on your area and your coverage, FaceTime works just great over 3G. It will eat up your data plan, but for those of you who took advantage of the 6GB plan, this will be no problem.

I do have to mention one other group of people who will always want to jailbreak. The pirates. There will always be people out there who think $.99 is way too much to pay for software. This is the reason the jailbreak community has such a bad rap. An open operating system is not what scares folks. It’s the fact that developers, who spend hours/days/weeks/months/years working on an app, don’t see a dime, if you’re not buying the app from the App Store. There are pirates in every aspect of consumable media, so I don’t think we’ll ever see this go away.

The tethered jailbreak for iOS 5 GM is out there now, in the form of Redsn0w 0.9.9b3, and the jailbreak for the official release will most likely be out shortly after iOS 5’s release. Stay tuned. You can also check out www.iJailbreak.com, for more jailbreak news. There is no word on how quick an iPhone 4S jailbreak will be released. It is not vulnerable to the current exploits being used (limera1n), but there may be userland exploits, that have yet to be made public. 😉

Let us know, in the comments, if you still plan to jailbreak, and what apps you’re still going to need, from Cydia.

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