Last Friday I spent the day “working from home” because I was anxiously awaiting my new iPhone 4S. It arrived around 1:30 PM Central and activated after about five angry hours. iOS 5 has some nifty new features, many of which where previously available if you got them by jail-breaking your iPhone. The hows and whys of which are a little outside of the scope of this post. Here’s a keen video about why you’d want to jail-break your iPhone, in case you live under a rock or haven’t been paying attention.
So now that you understand a little about it, I’ll go on to say that several annoyances haven’t been fixed in iOS 5. They include a vexing situation where if your car’s audio system supports music over bluetooth (a2dp) then even if you connect your iPhone to your head unit with the dock connector, the iPhone will try to switch back to bluetooth, causing you to ride in silence until you pull over and fix it. There are several message boards threads discussing bitching about this problem over at support.apple.com but the best they offer is to either disable a2dp (music over bluetooth) on your stereo or buy some $2.99 app that doesn’t currently work in iOS 5.
Other features still not available in the iOS that a jail-break would provide are:
- Pull down menu to toggle airplane mode, 3G data, adjust brightness and spell checker.
- Customizable fonts, colors, animations
- Customizable alert sounds, including SMS alerts
- Mobile SSH client
- Ad blockers, browser replacement options, browser download managers
- Wifi hotspot ability with no additional monthly fees
- Much more – see here
So now getting to my point: There are quite a few people like me who want the ability to jail-break their iPhone. It’s pretty common knowledge that one of the biggest players in the jail-break game, listed on the iPhone dev team blog is MuscleNerd. His twitter address is pretty public. So much so that he gets quite a few tweets, most of which are repetitious and some even hostile. I can understand the fervor that possesses one whose iPhone is still locked. I’m now one of them since the new iPhone 4S has yet to have a jail-break method released.
The waiting is maddening. It took 5 weeks before the last iPhone had a released jail-break. I don’t know if my fragile psyche can hold up. I’ve created a stream in Hootsuite to track who’s talking about him since MuscleNerd isn’t tweeting much himself. Here’s an excerpt:
Notice the back to back nature of the messages. Notice how some of them are at the same second. Every time I look away and come back to this stream there has been another or even several new tweets. Even as I write this there have been 3-4 more. I can relate to the desperation with which these complete strangers are bombarding poor MuscleNerd with demands for help, answers or to settle the newest rumor floating around. Thank god I have this stream though, or else I’d be joining them in their desperate vigil for news of the next exploit. News that what the Library Congress has deemed as legal to do to your own cell phone, is again possible.
God’s Speed dear dev team. God’s Speed.
