Introduction:
So you have your 3.0 iPhone and you can install thousands of apps from AppStore. What’s all this commotion about jailbreaking? Why would you need to jailbreak? What does it offer? In this post, I will cite some of the most compelling reasons to jailbreak your iPhone. I will continually update this post as changes occur.

Why Not Appstore:
Simply put, Apple’s rules for AppStore are way too limiting. The apps listed in the sections below are not possible to be in AppStore since they break one or more of Apple’s rules. These rules keep control of the iPhone platform in Apple’s control. Some of these rules include: patching system files such as SpringBoard, allowing apps to run in the background, running apps out of the “sandbox”, and simply doing things Apple decided that they don’t want you to do often for reasons to their benefit, not yours (such as tethering).

Risk Free:
Jailbreaking is not unlocking! It is risk free and totally legal. Everything that works before jailbreaking continues to work after. Jailbreaking only adds features. Jailbreaking is risk free and cannot void your warranty. You can simply restore in iTunes at anytime to get back to a factory state. You are not alone, many people are doing it. There are over 3 million jailbroken devices now!

Reason #1: Winterboard (or BossPaper) + Customization
Winterboard allows you to do this:

This is just the “tip of the iceberg”. There is so much more you can do. You can have web content as your background. My theme consists of 350 images that rotate every 15 seconds in a slide show.

You can even have video playing as your wallpaper!

4.0 users: think apple’s new backgrounds kills winterboard or bosspaper? Hardly. Winterboard lets you theme the whole UI. Bosspaper lets you pick a folder of images and lets them rotate on any interval you set in a slide show. How about your whole camera roll as rotating backgrounds?

Reason #2: SBSettings – Fast Toggles
So you’re in Safari. You turned off your WiFi or your 3G to save battery. Now you loaded Safari and it’s loading slowly with EDGE. Do you close out safari, open settings, traverse the menus and reenable the 3g? Or do you just live with the EDGE this time?

SBSettings solves this by providing fast toggles by swiping your status bar. With SBSettings, you just swipe your status bar, enable the wifi or 3G, and resume safari where you left off. When done, swipe again, and disable the battery draining wifi or 3G options Notice also the ability to add date and free memory to your status bar? The processes button allows you to free memory and kill backgrounded processes. Simple! SBSettings is must have.

Reason #3: SMS Quick Reply
The best feature of all SMS apps is the quickreply. When an incoming SMS arrives, you normally have to decide whether or not you will quit your existing app to respond or if you will respond later. With these apps, you get quick reply. You can just reply, on the spot, without leaving your current app or game. After you type your response and hit send, your app resumes right where it left off:

There are three apps out that offer better SMS: BiteSMS, MySMS and iRealSMS 3.0. In addition to landscape SMS, you can search contacts, search SMS, forward SMS, send SMS to multiple people at once, enable / disable keyboard correction. These are all features that are missing from the stock SMS client.

Reason #4: Backgrounder + ProSwitcher or Backgrounder + Circuitous

There are severe limitations imposed on AppStore apps. One of these is “no background processes.” This means that if you have an app, such as an instant messenger app, every time you press home to go to something else, the app is closed out. You are disconnected. You get no messages, no notification, nothing.

Backgrounder is an attempt to fix this. Backgrounder allows you to select an app that you want to allow to run in the background. Then when you press home, that app will keep running. Perfect for an IRC app (try multifl0w + backgrounder) or such that you do not want to get disconnected everytime you tap the home key. This adds critical functionality that you cannot get unless you jailbreak! On 3gs, you have plenty of memory to use this fully!

Combine this with ProSwitcher and you have a beautiful and simple interface into backgrounding one app and starting another. Activate ProSwitcher (in my case I have it to activate by double tapping status bar) and you get a coverflow view of all your running processes:

With this you can background and kill apps easily. While composing an email, quickly look something up on the web without closing your email program. Uses are endless.

4.0 users, you think Apple’s multitasking kills this? It doesn’t. You cant multitask any app with Apple’s. This also works on 3g, 2g, etc.

Reason #5: Folders (Categories App)

There are now some fantastic springboard add-ons for iPhone. These are OS level enhancements and are therefore, not allowed on AppStore. Those that do not have these are really missing out.

So I cant write this whole article without at least showcasing one of my own contributions. So here is Categories. This allows you to make folders on your springboard and move those pages of icons into folders. Think Games, Apps, Networking, etc. Reduce 9 pages of apps down to just 1!

4.0 users: you think apple’s folders kills this? Apple’s folders are limited to 12 icons per folder. That means your 200 games cant be in a “games” folder but must be in 20 games folders. 20 icons is still 2 pages and quite a mess. Doesn’t really solve the problem.

Reason #8: Unlocking
Finally, and I almost decided to leave this out, but the only way to unlock your iPhone and put it onto another carrier is by jailbreaking it. The unlocking apps will require system level patching and activation all of which can only be done via jailbreaking. Note also that you need not unlock to jailbreak. They are two separate things.

Reason #9: Phone Loss Tracking
iLocalis is an app that you can install onto your jailbroken iPhone and using its GPS / location services, it will tell you where the device is. If you have a 3g device with GPS, it will be pinpoint accurate. If you ever lose the device you can log into iLocalis web site and track the location of the device.

Reason #10: Quick Scroll
Quickscroll from KennyTM lets you get scrollbars in apps like safari. After installing it, just tap with 2 fingers and a scrollbar appears on the left or bottom that you can actually move. Imagine trying to follow a game faq while playing a video game or a long web page and having to finger down about 200 times to get to the end of the content. Now with the quick scroll you can just scroll there directly in a second. This is how things should have been done. Fully configurable in settings.

Reason #11: Music Controls
There are many music apps out in appstore such as pandora, orbmusic, slacker etc. These apps all can stream music or play music from different sources. Very nice right? The problem is that these apps don’t integrate into your iPhone. If you get an email when listening to music, you have to close the app, which stops the playback of music, to check it. If you get an sms, you have to quit playing music to view and respond to it. How dumb is that?

Music controls solves this by patching the controls directly into the springboard. You can see what’s playing, stop, next track, just like you do with the built in app. A must have for anyone that uses these music services.

In addition, and the reason I love music controls, is that it adds a statusbar view of the track that’s currently playing and lets you pause, next, prev there. You can see this in the screenshot below that shows musiccontrols going while I kick PDXGeek’s ass (from iphonerepocenter.com) in a friendly game of chess.

Reason #12: Bluetooth Keyboards

With this app called BTstack keyboard from Matthias Ringwald, jailbroken iPhone users can now use a bluetooth keyboard for text entry in your iPhone. Great for college or taking notes in a class or meeting at work! The app should work with most any bluetooth keyboard available. For more details see Ringwald’s product page.

The keyboard is available for $5 on Cydia Store.

All ABOVE JAILBREAK APPS WILL BE ON OUR >>VIP JAILBREAK SERVICES<<