I’ve had an iPhone for about 7 months. I’ve been a regular App Store user, buying all my stuff legitimately. This weekend, I decided to JailBreak it (how?). What convinced me to jailbreak it? I wanted control over my SMS alert. I just wanted a simple beep, no fancy 5 seconds long tone, just a goddamn beep. Apple didn’t judge it important to give its users control over that. I actually didn’t know much about the pros – but I knew everything I had to know about the cons. So, I figured I’d give it a try, for the sake of having more control over my device and just trying something different. I was pleasantly surprised! The whole “breaking” process was ridiculously easy – it just implied installing an application on my MBP, connecting my iPhone and running it. Everything went smoothly, and when my iPhone rebooted, it was jailbroken. That introduced me to a whole new world I wasn’t aware of, honestly. First off, I had the option of installing yellowsn0w, which is an application that would allow my iPhone 3G to be carrier independant. I didn’t need that, so I just didn’t install it. It might be something interesting for other users though, and the possibility is there and equally easy.

Basically, jailbreaking your iPhone will give you more customization power and, if you’re a Linux enthusiast, will allow you to SSH to your device and explore they filesystem. The great thing about it is that it doesn’t affect everything you did before jailbreaking – you can still sync it with iTunes. Here are my favorite applications, the ones that made jailbreaking worth it for me.

1. Cydia: Obviously. This application is basically a GUI frontend to APT running on the ramdisk. If that didn’t make sense to you, well let’s just say it’s an alternative community-powered App Store. Also has great management tool as well as a nifty Storage display.
2. WinterBoard: This application allows you to customize pretty much everything you might want to customize on your iPhone. The interesting thing about it is that as a bonus to the default options, you can install plugins that are available for it in Cydia – and there are a lot of them. Themes for the LockScreen, SMS, Applications, SpringBoard, Keyboard, Sounds and much more.
3. MakeItMine: Allows you to customize the carrier name that appears in the status bar (at the top) as well as the banner (the clock).
4. OpenSSH: Allows you to SSH to your device as root (so be careful!)
5. SBSettings: Adds a bunch of configuration option such as hiding icons, toggling WiFi/SSH/Bluetooth and more. There are also a bunch of plugins for it. Just the ability to hide the annoying Stocks, Youtube, iTunes, Notes and Calculator icons I never use is really refreshing.
6. Qik: Allows you to stream audio and video over the internet – how cool is that?!
7. Cycorder: Allows you to record videos on your iPhone, which is a seriously neglected feature by Apple.
8. Scrobble: Real time scrobbler for Last.fm. There is a Last.fm iPhone application available in the App Store, but it doesn’t scrobble songs, just lets you listen to radio. The PC/Mac Last.fm application does scrobble songs when your device is connceted, but I thought real time was more interesting. One amazing option of scrobble is the ability to turn off scrobbling when not on WiFi, which saves bandwidth.
9. Terminal: Obviously, a terminal application that allows you to have a command line tool for your iPhone.
10. Veency: Allows you to VNC directly on your iPhone – basically have graphical remote access, kind of like remote desktop.

Bonus: Netatalk: Lets you browse your iPhone as a shared drive on your Mac.