Jailbroken
For the past few months I've developed a growing disdain for my iPhone and I have a love hate relationship with my iPad. In and of themselves these are fantastic devices, beautiful and functional. But my growing frustration is with their Jobs imposed limitations.
In this day and age a vast number of people do their computing at home and at work, often on different computers. Yet, without some hacking, you can only sync your device to one copy of iTunes. With my music I was able to deal with this as it wasn't often I'd pick up more mp3's while at work, but with the iPad this limitation is incredibly frustrating. I've been regularly buying computer books in epub form while at work, but to get them on the iPad I put them in a Dropbox folder so I can add them to iTunes at home and then sync them to the device. Does this make any sense? Of course not. It would be less of an issue if the iPad itself supported adding epub's to iBooks via Safari instead of just through the iBookstore itself. That iTunes on the PC is a giant piece of crap only adds to the problem.
Then there's the Flash argument. We've all discussed this to it's limit. We know Android is getting Flash 10.1 and by most accounts it's pretty awesome. The censorship of apps by the App Store is another ongoing concern. A quick Google will provide many more tales about the shortcomings of the Apple ecosystem.
So the other day between the advent of jailbreakme.com and a newly package version of Frash available on Cydia, I made the leap and jailbroke my 3GS. The experience was almost thrilling. Seeing command line code running across the screen, reboots and endless lists of vaguely described packages made my heart flutter.
The true moment of zen though came as I started playing with the new apps available to me. Strongbad emails playing in Safari using Frash (a port of the Flash Player) clearly prove the device is capable of running Flash content. Accessing the root level storage on the device over SSH was mind blowing. Running PlaceTrack in the background and having it update my Google Latitude location actually makes Latitude useful on the iPhone. But the real ultimate utility and brings with it new found freedom to my iPad is MyWi, the app that lets you setup the iPhone as a wifi hotspot, so I can get my iPad online over 3G now without paying for 3G on the iPad.
Thing about this all is that despite being Jailbroken, the rest of the phone behaves as it always has. This is how technology should be, well designed, simple to use, but with the freedom to use it as you see fit, not as the benevolent dictator of some corporation thinks you should – mostly so that he can make even more money by being the only way to buy content for your hardware.
At the end of the day jailbreaking for me is just an interim solution until I can justify dropping money on an Android phone.