Today, Dev-team released Redsn0w 0.9.8b1, capable of jailbreaking the latest Apple operating system for mobile devices, iOS 5 (beta).
This is a tethered jailbreak which means that you will have to connect your device to a computer and run Redsn0w in order to achieve ‘jailbreak mode’ on it.
With all these improvements added to iOS5, is still worth to jailbreak your device?
I used to jailbreak my iPhone in the past in order to obtain higher customization level for it, gain access to settings that were not available in the official iOS, tweaks that could improve my iDevice experience after all.
Many of these ‘improvements’ are already available with iOS 5, still few are missing.
In my opinion, iOS 5 is a great step forward for Apple, which seems to have learned from the jailbreak community in the benefit of their clients. Wish that many companies would do the same (e.g. Sony).
Some of the features that helped Apple achieving this step forward are:
Unified notifications
Phone-to-Phone messaging
Newspaper/Magazine subscriptions
Advanced reminder system
System-wide Twitter integration
Quick-camera access
Photo editing tools
Tabbed browsing
Reader view
Reach text email
PC-free setup/updates
Wi-fi sync
Not many of the today’s mobile operating systems are coming with so many features making iOS one of the best mobile operating system on the market today.
Still, the question the jailbreak still a necessity?
Many users will say “YES”, jailbreak is a ‘must have’, probably because they are not aware of what the new iOS can do, some still may have favorite applications which are not available in the new iOS (e.g. BiteSMS), but many will stay away from jailbreak from now on because most of the features that they jailbreaked for are now part of the OS.
In the past, jailbreaking was considered illegal, voiding your device warranty.
Few years later it all become legal as long as you are not installing / using paid applications for free by using the jailbreak tools.
Today, jailbreak means more than just allowing non-signed applications to run on your device (Apple require that every application that runs on your iDevice to be signed with a certificate, this way they have a better control over their device and the applications that runs on it), it became a cult.
We still have to wait until the final version of iOS 5 is released, but by taking a look at the beta version, iOS incorporated features that no other mobile operating system can be proud of, making iOS 5 one of the best releases that Apple come out with.