While visiting my friend, he finally wore me down and I let him jailbreak my phone. This gave me the ability to change how the UI looked, to some extent. Beyond that, it also severely decreased system performance and stability, causing my phone to run slow when doing simple things like, say, opening my sms messaging app.   

Beyond that, the app to get more jailbroken apps was slow, somewhat confusing to navigate, and not all that helpful. Some apps worked on the 3.0 software platform, others didn’t. I was never fully sure which ones would work and which wouldn’t.

Overall, I found the experience to be about what I expected it to be – too much hassle for too little gain – i.e. not worth it.

To a point I can see why some people Jailbreak. The phone doesn’t offer them everything they want, and jailbreaking is a way to freely get what they are looking for out of their device. They forgive the flaws and drawbacks, the performance hit, etc in the name of having that one killer app that they just can’t live without. There ARE some cool apps out there for jailbroken phones, and you can still take advantage of the app store – but you have to wait to upgrade to a new phone OS – including patch updates – until it’s been jailbroken.

Call me silly, but one of the draws of the iPhone is that it’s a system that works. When there’s an update to the software I just plug the phone in and it updates. I don’t have to wait, I don’t have to worry about being able to use some of my apps. I don’t have to re-add those apps in after an update. Everything is there, exactly like it was. Life is good. If there’s something I want the phone to do, in 99.9% of cases I can find it on the App store. in that .1% where I can’t… I can live without it.

The main complaints I had about the phone have been addressed: Cut and Paste, voice activation (on my 3GS), better camera w/video support (again 3GS) tethering (as I’ve mentioned here before) and the ability to search through my email or other items on my phone. There’s really nothing left to compel me to want to jailbreak.

I’ve done it, I’ve used it, and you know what? It’s just not for me.

The update provides some wonderful new features (searching, cut and paste to name a few) with a few promised to be “on the horizon”. What it doesn’t offer, for those on AT&T anyways, is MMS and Tethering, two of the most sought after features. Two that SHOULD be there, but aren’t because AT&T seriously dropped the ball.

For those who are adventurous, it IS possible to enable tethering on the iPhone on AT&T. While I do vouch for these instructions working, I do not know what – if any – repercussions may come from following them. You do so at your own risk, and I will not be held accountable for YOUR actions.

Having said that – here’s how to enable it (if you’re using Mac OS X)

• First, download This File to your desktop
• Next, connect your iphone to your computer. If it syncs when you first connect it, wait until it finishes syncing.
• Then, run the following in a terminal: defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
• finally, go to the device summary for your iPhone within iTunes, while holding down the Option key, press “Restore”. in the window that opens locate the ipcc file you downloaded in the first step, select it and click ok.

NOTE: If for some reason the ipcc file is grayed out, re-run the command in the terminal. I had to run it twice for it to work.

Now, tethering is enabled on your phone, to turn it on go to Settings -> General -> Network, you’ll see a new option there to enable Tethering. Click that button and follow instructions.

There you have it – you can do what you want with this information, but you do it at your own risk

Enjoy!

[Update]: my buddy Brian points out that if you download the file linked above, directly onto the iPhone, it goes into effect immediately. shaving off three steps.  Thanks Brian!

This past weekend, and over the past couple of days,  I’ve changed the network topology quite a bit – setting up one of the XServes as a gateway device with NAT, DHCP, DNS, NFS, Open Directory (with Kerberos) and XGrid – the last one not currently being used, but I am contemplating a few uses.  I then set up the second XServe to serve as a media server housing all of my digital media – music, movies, tv shows, etc.  This server isn’t yet, but soon will be, linked to my AppleTV in my media center (via gigabit ethernet) to sync my movies and shows across.

I’ve got a few things left to accomplish to make everything run smoothly, but for the most part things are looking great and working well. 

OS X Server 10.5.4 runs incredibly smooth and has been a joy to use (as opposed to my previous experiences with OS X Server which had issues, though I believe that to have been a corrupt installation or something.).   I was able to get the gateway device setup pretty easily following instructions found in Apple’s X-Grid clustering and advanced computing guide (available on their site). 

I’m still waiting for my iPhone 3G – I made the mistake of doing a direct fulfillment from AT&T (apple’s store here was out of stock and I was impatient).  Unfortunately AT&T has been slower than an elderly woman with a broken hip when it comes to actually doing the fulfillment.  It’s been two weeks and still no iPhone.  Way to drop the ball AT&T.