My iPhone is perfect in almost every way, and I owe it to jailbreaking. At first, I thought that the best part of jailbreaking was the themes that you could apply to the device through Winterboard. But, after months upon months playing around and utilizing my iPhone, I have realized that the true gem of the jailbreaking world is the widgets.
Now, they are only available for jailbroken phones through cydia, but there are tons of them. My three favorites are the Famous Quotes Widget, StatusNotifier, and several miscellaneous other things.
The Famous Quotes Widget
Before jailbreaking and my discovery of the wonders that are widgets, my lock screen was mighty dull. Right now, you probably only use it to show off a movie poster and check the time, but it can be so much more! For instance, by using the Famous Quotes Widget, my lock screen always contains a short quote every time I look at it. This makes my lock screen a place of surprise, humor, and intellect (where I can still show off movie posters and check the time). I doubt that it has ever crossed your mind before now that your lock screen could be utilized much more than it already is, and the Famous Quotes Widget does exactly this: it takes what used to be boring (your lock screen), and makes it entertaining! The widget refreshes the quote about once a minute, or each time you re-lock your phone. The widget cycles through hundreds of quotes, and, after using for months, I have only seen a couple of duplicates. The Famous Quotes Widget gives your lock screen a purpose, a mission: your entertainment.
StatusNotifier
I use my iPhone all the time for numerous different things; e-mail, phone calls, messaging, texting… All of these things go in and out of my phone constantly and, frankly, they are all a little bit hard to keep track of. That’s where StatusNotifier comes in. StatusNotifier simply adds a small icon to the right of your battery of one, or some, or all of the following: an envelope if you have unread e-mail, a telephone if you have a missed call and/or a voicemail, a smiley face if you have unread messages via a messaging app, or a voice bubble if you have unread text messages. It makes using the iPhone so much easier since you don’t have to remember what you have to check next, or constantly read tiny red bubbles that blend into fields of icons to see what’s needed of you. StatusNotifier provides an organized, simple way to keep multi-tasking as straightforward and uncluttered as possible on the iPhone.
Miscellaneous Things
I want my iPhone to be my iPhone. That is one of the main reasons I decided to jailbreak my phone. There are several little widget-type things that I use on my phone to customize it. These include a 5 icon dock, a reflective dock, and constantly-updated weather and clock icons. The 5 icon dock has made my iPhone more efficient since I now have the App Store icon in the dock, in addition to the default icons, allowing easier access to more commonly used apps. The reflective dock adds a very nice effect to the overall look of my home screen, and the constantly updated clock icon and weather icon are both very cool and very useful since I don’t have to open the weather app every time I want to see what the weather is currently like. These assorted, wigdet-y things make my iPhone more personalized, efficient, and cool-looking.
Jailbreaking isn’t for everyone, but it sure does make the iPhone a heck-of-a-lot more personal and easy, especially with the addition of entertaining, efficient, and visually pleasing widgets.
To get any and all of the above widgets, add the ModMyi, Telesphoreo Tangelo, and BigBoss sources.
No Backgrounder? No xGPS? Clippy? SBSettings? I can think of more useful applications than a quote generator.
I agree that those applications are better than these widgets, but this is an article about widgets–little, personalized things like a reflective dock or a random quotes generator–not full-fledged apps.
I ran jailbroken for about four months on my first gen iphone. 2.2.1 came out and I couldn’t upgrade xcode without upgrading the phone, so I reverted.
There were some interesting things, I was able to tether my laptop during a power outtage, but then I don’t take the laptop out of the house that often.
I sat down and thought about it and really, the only thing I really miss that I don’t have without jailbreak is SBSettings to quick toggle wifi and set the brightness. Five icon dock gets an honorable mention.
On the downside, the jailbroken phone was unstable. It would kill networking every few days in a way that only a reboot would solve. Using app store apps became harder and harder, as they became slower and slower. And by the end, rebooting took nearly 5 minutes.
I’d love to have the flexibility of a jailbroken phone, but I don’t need hardly any of the apps that are jailbreak only. Can’t justify it.
And I fully expect that the next iPhone that I buy in June will be unjailbreakable for some time, no matter what the pwnage people have managed to do to the 3.0 betas.
Jailbreak features are undoubtedly awesome but having jailbroke my iphone twice I found that it went from an apple product that “just works” to a buggy unstable mess after jailbreaking it. I’m now permanently legit and have no desire to jailbreak it again no matter what else people come up with.