Getting around Springboard

If you're like me, you load up your iPhone with lots of apps, then spend lots of time swiping right and left to get to your numerous apps, often a pain and definitely time consuming.

However, with a jailbroken iPhone you have two nice options : Orbit and OverBoard. For a mere $1.99 your swiping pains can be a thing of the past.

Both perform essentially the same key task : when activated you are presented with a screen of thumbnails that represent each of your screens. All you need to do is touch the thumbnail of the screen that you want to go to and you're there!

Both Orbit and OverBoard can be invoked by pressing the home button or tapping the application icon - OverBoard can also be activated by a screen pinch ( a bit less precise method ).





I personally prefer OverBoard over Orbit as it is a bit faster than Orbit and I likes the speed man - ( I haven't tried out the latest version of Orbit, v1.1.4 ). With OverBoard I also like that when you are at the thumbnail screen you can press the home button again to take you immediately to the first screen ( I like to "home" my Springboard on the first screen when I'm finished using my iPhone ).

Orbit and OverBoard are both valuable time saving utilities and are definitely worth the $1.99 ... get one of them!

Backup!

I am amazed at the number of iPhone users who use their iPhone as the primary source of their contacts. This is a bad idea as if for any reason your iPhone becomes unusable, you risk losing your contacts for good. For most people, their contacts are important.

A good habit to get into is to sync your iPhone regularly with iTunes - I do it daily. This will first backup your iPhone so you can recover your settings, etc. from a backup if you ever need to. However, with a setting change or two you can also backup your contacts as well.

Once your iPhone is plugged into your PC/Mac and iTunes is running, select your iPhone in the left pane of iTunes and then click on the "Info" tab in the right pane. From there you can configure several sync settings but for now focus on Contacts. There are several external contact managers that you can choose to sync your contacts with - in Windows there is Outlook, Google Contacts, Windows Contacts, and Yahoo! Address Book. On the Mac there only appears to be one free external source, Mac's own contact manager ( I could be wrong here, there may be other sources but all I can see is Mac's contact manager ) - of course there's always the paid service MobileMe.



Unless you already use a contact manager such as Outlook, you can keep it simple and choose "Windows Contacts" ( this is on Vista, it may be called something slightly different on an XP or Windows 7 PC ).

Now, once you click on "Sync contacts with" and select your external contact manager on the right you just need to select "Apply" or "Sync" at the bottom right of iTunes. After the sync your iPhone contacts will be saved in Windows Contacts on your PC. Your initial sync may ask you if you want to replace the contacts on your iPhone with the ones on your PC and vice versa ... just choose "Merge" to play it safe.

Now if you lose your iPhone ( pray that never happens ) or if it gets bricked or unusable for any reason, you will always have your precious contacts saved on your PC or Mac, you simply have to sync them from your contact manager ( e.g. Windows Contacts ) to your new or fixed iPhone, disaster averted.

If you're like me, your contact information is precious/valuable, you don't want to EVER lose them. With these simple steps you can ensure that your contacts will always be safe.

3GS bootrom issue

While ALL iPhone models ( 2Gm 3G, 3GS ) can be jailbroken at any firmware versions, newer 3GS iPhones have an issue that require a re-jailbreak EVERY TIME you shut off, then restart, your iPhone ( whether deliberately or not ) ... this is called a tethered jailbreak. NOTE that your iPhone will be completely unusable until it is re-jailbroken.

This issue arose because Apple patched the exploit that hackers have been using, this impacts the iPod Touch 3 units as well.

The 3GS iPhones ( and iPods as noted above ) impacted are ones that were manufactured on or after week 40 or 2009. How to tell if your 3GS has this bootrom issue? Look at the 4th and 5th digits of your serial number to determine your production month, see Settings -> General -> About -> Serial Number. In this example, 87942 ( the first five digits of the serial number ), the third digit tells you the production year, 2009, and the 4th and 5th digits tell you the production week, 42. For this fellow, his iPhone 3GS has the new bootrom and will require a re-jailbreak after any powerdown.

I am confident that the iPhone hackers will eventually find a new bootrom vulnerability to exploit. However, I have not heard of anyone who is looking for one ( doesn't mean that no one is looking for one ).

Two flavors of jailbreaking

Currently there are two primary sources of jailbreak and unlock software : the Dev-Team and geohot.

The Dev-Team consists of several iPhone hackers and they have two current jailbreak offerings : Pwnage Tool and redsn0w.

Pwnage Tool is a jailbreak tool that is Mac-only and allows you to create a custom firmware bundle to upgrade, jailbreak, and, if necessary, activate your iPhone. This tool is favored when you want to upgrade your iPhone's firmware to 3.1.x but want to keep your current baseband ( which is what is exploited in order to unlock your iPhone ). This was particularly useful when there was no unlock for the 3.1.x firmware. Pwnage Tool performs other tasks such as pre-installs applications from Cydia and it also allows you to use custom boot logos. Note that Pwnage Tool is a destructive upgrade as it will wipe your iPhone clean : your apps, songs, settings, etc. will be deleted. Make sure that you sync your iPhone via iTunes before using Pwnage Tool.

redsn0w is available for the Mac and Windows and will jailbreak and activate your 3G or 3GS - it is a non-destructive upgrade : all apps, songs, settings, etc. will remain on your iPhone after redsn0w has been run. For the 2G, redsn0w also performs an unlock if you select it. redsn0w is favored when your current firmware can be jailbroken and unlocked and your don't need anything fancy.

ultrasn0w is the Dev-Team's current unlock software. It is installed from Cydia and will unlock iPhones that are on 3.0.x firmware. It will also run on a 3.1.2 iPhone that has been upgraded from 3.0.x to 3.1.x using Pwnage Tool. This is the configuration that my 3GS is currently running on.

geohot is a brilliant individual and provides two jailbreaking software : purplera1n for 3.0 firmware and blackra1n for 3.1.x firmware. Note that he does not provide a jailbreak solution for 3.0.1.

blackra1n is geohot's current jailbreak offering and was hailed as it is a 15 second jailbreak that runs on both Mac and Windows computers and is non-destructive. Many people were waiting for this jailbreak as the Dev-Team's Pwnage Tool is only available for Macs ( although the resulting custom firmware bundle can be used on both Macs and Windows computers ).

geohot's unlock solution that partnered with blackra1n, blacksn0w, has been eagerly waited as there was no unlock for iPhones that were running 3.1.x firmware. I have found that blackra1n works without issue on the 3G iPhone. However, for the 6 3GS iPhones on 3.1.x that I have jailbroken and unlocked I have had WIFI issues : no WIFi until I performed a "Reset Network Settings" and rebooted the 3GS. Afterwards, no problems.

With these offerings from these two groups, the iPhone jailbreaking community is well-taken care of and I give them MANY thanks! Now we just need a solution for the new bootroom that is plaguing iPhone 3GS that were manufactured on and after week 40 of 2009 ... but that's another story.