The jailbreak for the iOS 4.0.1 was released yesterday. They chose to make it a mobile website you simply had to visit on your phone, then slide to begin the download (identical looking to the lock screen slider on the iPhone, clever). Naturally when i tried late last night the servers were swamped and I had no luck. Right before I went to bed around 1:30am i tried one last time and it worked! After about a minute download and two minute installation, I rebooted my phone and started playing with Cydia, the default app store that comes with the jailbreak. 

There was a lot of hype on the internet about how great jailbreaking your phone was and that may have held true prior to iOS 4 but now i feel like the excitement was a little overdone. Gone is the need for jailbreak apps that create folders or add multitasking functionality. The immense amount of “wallpaper apps” that were once the only way of changing the background of the iPhone seem to clutter the store now, collecting dust as people simply use Apple’s new wallpaper setting.

But for all my disappointment, I have found reason to be excited. There are apps that let me tweek the look of the phone for the better, namely Winterboard. While I’m not big into the custom themes that were online (not one I tried had been updated to be compatible with the Retina Display), there were fun little things that made my phone….unique. I currently have a reskined Safari icon that looks like Google’s Chrome browser, my dock now supports 5 apps, and there is no longer text beneath apps, just pictures.

I downloaded a few other things I’m still playing around with, namely Lockscreen and SBsettings. I won’t go in depth about what they are (because googling them yourself would yield much more accurate reviews and tutorials) but I will say that while jailbreaking isn’t “liberating” as many bloggers would lead people to believe, it does open up interesting possibilities to push my phone to be more customizable, user friendly, and as far as I can tell thus far….better.

It has only been a day so my thoughts may change when my phone bricks or Steve Jobs calls me up to tell me I’m being sued…but until then I’m gonna keep on tinkerin’.