This had to be by design. Jobs must love hackers. I am positive Steve Jobs wanted the iPhone to be the kind of awesome only an underground elite squad of coders could program it to be. How else could the iPhone be so much better jailbroken?

I guess what I’m trying to say is: I jailbroke my iPhone. I’ve been using it stock for a good three months waiting for legal apps to come out but enough is enough. The last straw was when I saw a video on YouTube of someone playing guitar on their iPhone.

Jailbreaking was free and easy to do. I just downloaded Ziphone, synced my iPhone to make a solid backup of my contacts, then clicked Jailbreak. After a few minutes, it was done and my iPhone was free.

Before this, I had always wondered how people downloaded applications to a jailbroken iPhone. Well, after jailbreaking(at least the way I did it) a new icon shows up on your home screen called Installer. Tap that and you’re greeted with a plethora of programs. Things like Tap Tap Revolution, Drummer, vt100-term(a sold ssh client), and VNotes.

I’ve found myself playing Drummer far more than I ever would have imagined(plugged into car stereo? fuggedaboutit). Also VNotes has been quite handy for recording voice memos. Finally Sketches allows me to draw notes with my finger and annotate pictures.

It’s impressive just how much this device can do sans the shackles of Apple’s digital software jail. The wifi, the accelerometers, the camera, the multi-touch high-resolution screen, and the 16GB of flash memory can be just frickin’ rocked past all those places where rocking can rock a conventional phone. Nice job jailbreakers and iPhone app developers. I really do need to donate some dough.

In closing: Jailbreaking good. If you don’t have an iPhone, get one somehow and jailbreak it. That is all.

I’ve had an iPhone for the past couple of months and I’m what you’d call a heavy user. I need email on the go and I like to check websites as well. So I figure it’d be useful to mention a few things I think haven’t been mentioned before about the device.

1. The iPhone is one of the few devices you can actually hand to a baby(granted it’s protected by an incase) and not worry about random phone calls or even that the little one’s going to change the song.

2. Takes too many clicks to get places. Put two more buttons down there(with OLED’s like this thing) and it’ll be a lot quicker to do stuff.

3. Wireless data over ATT’s network works well enough that jumping on tmobile’s network while at Starbucks is unnecessary and actually annoying because you have to sign in to maintain internet access. So I’ve “forgotten this network” several times while at Starbucks only to logon again later when I have the urge to check out the recently played songs. Maybe there could be an option to demote an ssid below the cellphone data service.

4. As an iPod, it’s replaced my other one I use in my car for this one cool feature that is born out of integration. It turns off the music when you get a phone call! So I can totally blast it and not worry that I’ll miss a call. Unfortunately if I blast the music, my particular setup tells me a lot more about the phone’s communications with the cell network than I ever wanted to know but it just tolerable enough that I tolerate it. If anyone has some tips on how to minimize that interference, I’m all ears.

5. Visual voicemail is every bit as useful as it was billed to be.

6. Your phone message gets played without any annoying cell-phone provider pretext. No, you don’t want to hit 5 to page. Yes, you know how to end a damn voice message. Duh! On the iPhone, and I can imagine Jobs throwing a hissy fit for this and for good reason, the first thing you hear when you are unfortunately sent to voicemail, is the greeting. It’s nice having a little more control over the voicemail experience.

7. It has no redial.

8. It’s actually a mini-boombox and that’s all kinds of fun.

So I’ve only got 8 items right now. Maybe I’ll think of more. Maybe not. But if you’re trying to decide whether or not to get one, I say do it. I didn’t even jailbreak it and it works well for me.