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5 Must Have Jailbreak Apps

April 7, 2009

Some people who have not yet delved into the jailbreaking experience are asking "Why would I want to jailbreak my phone?".  For these people I have put together my top 5 must have jailbreak apps.  The following apps are only available to those who have jailbroken their phone, and will likely never been seen in the App Store due to the way they run in the background, or interact with the OS. 1) pdaNET I did a review a while back (ok, a long while back) on June Fabrics' pdaNET application.  The application allows you to turn your iPhone into a 3G wireless router that can be shared with any other wifi device.  For more information on pdaNET please see my earlier review here. 2) Winterboard Winterboard allows you to customize your iPhone or iPod and make it truly unique.  The ability to theme almost any aspect of the user interface simply, and easily makes Winterboard a real must have application.  Using Winterboard is easy and intuitive, simply install Winterboard from Cydia, download a few themes from the hundreds available in Cydia, and enable the newly downloaded themes in the Winterboard app.  After a brief refresh of the SpringBoard your iPhone will look like no other iPhone in your neighborhood.  Again check out my Winterboard how-to for more information, also see the screenshots below for example of what Winterboard can do for you. 3) sbSettings sbSettings is a great app that allows quick access to system toggles.  For example you swipe your finger across the clock on the top of the screen and a pull down appears allowing you to turn on/off wifi, 3g, edge, ssh, airplane mode, or even hide and show icons on the SpringBoard.  I use this app mostly for quick access to the brightness controls of the phone, but there are a ton of plugins available for sbSettings to increase it's usability for you. Here is a screenshot of sbSettings in action on my phone. 4) mxTube mxTube is a great way to grab clips and videos of youtube and store them on your phone for later viewing.   Not only does it download youtube.com clips to the phone's storage which can be viewed offline, on an airplane, in a car, where no internet service is available, but it also lets you download the high definition versions of those videos. Check out my earlier how-to on using mxTube here! 5)  Categories Categories is an awesome little tool for those of you who have too many icons on your SpringBoard and need a way to organize them.  It allows you to create folders that you can organize your apps into.  It also now has the ability to run that folder in the background so the load time is quick and less painful. See my review for more information, it can be found here. There are many more useful apps that can be found in Cydia on a jailbroken phone, this is only a scratch of the surface.  Look into other apps such as SwirlyMMS, QuickGold, and Intelliscreen if you don't believe me.   The above 5 apps are the ones that I can not live without on my phone, and will never make it to the app store as long as apple has it's sandbox restrictions in place with the SDK. Have an app you find useful, mention it in the comments below!