Ven1 vid1 ja1lbreak1: Hands on with blackra1n

I couldn't wait to jailbreak my first gen iPhone and once accomplished, I loved all the amazing extra capabilities (pre app store), themes, video recording, games, etc. I never went full bore and unlocked it to be free from ATT since there was nowhere to go in my case. Then came the iphone 3g with the app store and I realized the only thing I was getting from jailbreaking was themes (why we still can't legitimately do this is silly), and I was putting up with a lot of instability for those icons, so I quit messing with the roll your own stuff and went back to the sanctioned OS. Now I have a 3GS and have no desire to jailbreak. I've probably spent $20-30 on more apps than I have time to play with, and some I depend on daily. I would NEVER knock the JB community, without those great hackers early on, we may not have gotten the app store and other capabilities as soon as we did. I believe they really lit a fire under apple's a**. Keep pushing guys, cheers!

Very interesting article. How does one go about "un-jailbreaking" their device if they find its not all its cracked up to be or are having issues?

Simply a matter of hitting Restore in iTunes and resetting to factory settings?

So now TUAW is advocating hacking and piracy? Nice.

I used blackra1n on my ipt2 because a recent pwnage update would not install on my ipod and I was forced to unjailbreak it at 3.1.2- meaning pwnage wouldn't jailbreak it anymore without a lot of work.

I prefer this method to pwnage, it's easier, faster, and doesn't require a full install. I've experienced none of the problems mentioned in the article (or on the comments) and the rock app surprised me, it's much better than cydia!! Cydia has ignored the app portion of it's store, i find it almost unusable waiting for it to refresh ever couple minutes!

great review!

I have it on the 3GS (new as of two weeks ago) and I have the reboot issue. Every time it starts up from being completely shut down, whether by a crash or me manually turning it off, it goes into DFU mode and I need to use Blackra1n to fix it. I turn it off very rarely and it has only crashed 2 times (I assume from one of my jailbreak apps), but it is still annoying. Fortunately I take my laptop almost everywhere with me so it's not the end of the world if it happens.

I find myself using less and less jailbreak apps, but I still find SBSettings, Backgrounder, and Kirikae too essential to pass up on. I constantly have to adjust my brightness and turn on/off my bluetooth, and to have to go into multiple pages of the Settings app is too disruptive, especially while I am driving. SBSettings solves that problem. Furthermore, certain apps that require a lengthy loading/downloading time (RSS apps, for instance) are great to start up, put in the background, and return to once they're ready for viewing. So the tethered bootup, for me, is annoying but absolutely worth it.

I used it for my touch. It works great and I have had no issues with it. The only problem is that you can never really turn the touch off completely or let the battery drain. A tether is required to get it back to running properly. No big deal for me. Maybe for others. But I have had no issues with it.

Another point worth noting. I gave up Cydia and use Rock now. And IMHO, Rock is TONS better.

Just my $.02

My understanding (and experience when I tried it on my iPhone 3GS) was that you only need to use the blackra1n app to reboot your phone if the battery drains out completely. The normal hold sleep button, slide to power off, hold sleep button again to boot up worked just without being tethered.

AND... if you use the run the BlackSn0w app (the Carrier Unlock download found in the BlackRa1n app), you can enable NATIVE tethering using one of the modified AT&T Profiles (instructions are on the main BlackRa1n.com site (click the big picture))

I wrote a detailed tutorial with screen shots on this method when the
program came out November 3rd, here:

http://www.hackthatphone.com/3x/b_3_1_2_3g.html

I even used an already unlocked 3G, which I then upgraded to the new
evil baseband, to demonstrate that this would work. It went off without a hitch.

After I used blackra1n to jailbreak, my iPhone would occasionally not pick up any wifi signals at all. I believe I'm not the only one, but by no means do I speak for everyone who jailbroke using blackra1n. After I got bored of restting network settings every other day, I decided a fresh install was much better.