iPhone 3G jailbreak, not just for ninjas anymore

When the first iPhone came out, I was boycotting it. Lame, I know, but I refused to go to the Apple store and even look at it. I knew the second I got my hands on one, I’d have to buy it right there on the spot, and I really wasn’t in the mood to spend 600 bucks. I’m proud to say I held out for a whole week.

When it comes to hacking the iPhone, I was a bit more cautious. It made sense to jailbreak the first-gen phone; Apple didn’t have a way to add new software. But now there’s the iTunes AppStore and it kinda nullified the need to jailbreak for a lot of people. But as cool as it is, there are quite a few features that should be common place on a smartphone yet absent on the iPhone: video recording, MMS messages, most of the bluetooth features like file transfers and stereo music, copy/paste, etc.

This is where jailbreaking comes in. Just like Knight Rider’s KITT had KARR, there’s a renegade version of the appStore out there called Cydia that lets you install all the apps Apple doesn’t deem fit for its precious baby. My current fave is Cycorder, a video camera app. Sure it’s only 12 frames a second video, but that’s 12 more than it could do before. Here’s a sample I took at the skatepark.