iPhone 3GS – One Week Jailbroken – A Few More Quick Thoughts
It ‘s been a little over one week of running my iPhone 3GS jailbroken now. I ‘m a little surprised to say that I think I ‘ll be sticking with the jailbreak “ at least for a while longer. As I ‘ve mentioned before, my main reason for staying jailbroken “ by some distance “ is the ability to quickly switch between apps via the brilliant mQuickDo application.
In addition to deciding to stick with the jailbreak for now, I ‘ve got a few more very quick thoughts on the ‘new ‘ jailbreak experience after having been ‘stock ‘ for a long while.
So here are some very quick thoughts on being jailbroken again with the 3GS:
Stability – overall is good, but not as good as it was when running stock. The 3GS just about * never * required a reboot of any kind “ and certainly not a hard reboot “ when it was running stock. Since being jailbroken I ‘ve had two complete freeze-ups requiring a hard reboot, and multiple other reboots following app installs and similar. This is not a huge deal, and everything has always been just fine after reboots, but it ‘s worth noting.
Performance “ is stellar. I ‘ve seen * zero * lag or slowdowns of any kind. The 3GS still flies. Memory management is still superb “ every time I check it via iStat or Free Memory, things are looking very good in terms of available memory “ and can be hiked up even further with just a few taps.
Battery Life – seems maybe a tad worse, but I ‘ve not tried to measure this properly, so can ‘t say for sure. I have installed Backgrounder but have found I don ‘t need apps running in the background, because they launch just as fast from ‘a standing start ‘ via mQuickDo “ so apart from SBSettings this should not be having any impact on battery.
Jailbreak Apps “ Honestly have not found very many that have great appeal for me so far. I check out new things in Cydia each day, but have still only added a very small handful. I ‘m open to your suggestions, of course.
Cydia “ Speaking of apps, I am using only Cydia so far as my jailbreak app store (have not tried Icy as an alternative yet). While I very much admire the overall role Cydia carries out on the iPhone, I have to say I ‘m not a big fan of its implementation. As in, it is strewn with ads everywhere. I ‘m fine with the folks who make Cydia making some money for their efforts “ I think that ‘s a good thing, but I wish the ads could be (much) less intrusive. There are many pages that take noticeably longer to load, purely while waiting for ads to load. And many that feel extremely messy because they are so littered with ads, making it difficult at times to even spot where there is any actual information about an app on a page.
Themes “ I installed Winterboard a couple days back, but haven ‘t found any themes I really want to use yet. I guess I ‘m a lot fussier than I used to be, but I see lots of themes which look pretty awful to me, and very few that look appealing and / or usable “ as I really don ‘t want a theme that does too much or looks like it may diminish battery life or performance. I ‘m just after a simple theme that adds a little life to my springboard. Very open to suggestions in this area as well.
That ‘s about it for one-week quick observations. For now, app switching will continue to make the jailbreak worthwhile, for as long as performance stays solid.
I have used Winterboard mostly for the User Wallpaper, User Lockscreen, Dim Wallpaper, Liveclock, Weathericon, and Volume Boost.
Have you found SB Settings to drain battery?
And you are correct, stability does suffer but jailbreak has gotten much better about the lag issues.
I think I may give that basic approach a try with Winterboard as well – had been considering it and the more I think about it, the more I think that's all I really want – and I don't even need the last three of those.
Liveclock and Weathericon will hurt battery life (a litte) but man is it nice to have the active UI working.
And have you found that you wish mQuickDo had the toggles of SB Settings (wifi, bluetooth, volume, etc.) so that you would only need one of the two services? Seems to be too much duplication for me.
Hadn't been thinking much on that, but I only use mQuickDo for app switching and quick returns to home screen – so not too fussed about the overlap for now.
Honestly, there are a lot of things that I enjoy via Winterboard. I happen to be the type of person who doesn't like a bunch of wacky sh*t on my phone, I prefer elegance and functionality.
The setup I have right now is as follows:
-"Illumine" theme
-WeatherIcon
-"Illumine Weather Icon"
-3D Fiction II movie wallpaper
-Notifier
-Push Mod (which makes EVERY mailbox instantly checked every 1 minute, but sacrifices battery life)
-5 Icon Dock
-Five Column Springboard
-SpringBack (which saves the positioning of your SpringBoard apps in case of SafeMode crashes)
-GriP
-Intelliscreen
and I absolutely LOVE my setup. It truly makes it look like a professionally designed alternative to thesock iPhone. I can't recomment the "Illumine" theme enough. This is the best theme I have found on the Internet, and do not intend on switching it. Ever.
Yes, it's THAT good.
Thanks for all the good suggestions. That theme does look better than most I've looked at. I'm very theme-shy right now though, but may not stay that way. GriP is one I need to try out. Some of those others sound cool, but not up my alley in terms of preferences at least for now.
Did you tried "Notifier" and "Lock Calendar" from Cydia?
Very useful for me and the main reason why i have jailbroken my iPhone 3G
Nope – will give those a look – thanks.
I completely agree with you about Cydia. It's awesome to have it, so I can't complain much, but it could definitely be so much better and still allow ads. They are far too obtrusive and do take far too long to load. I've found myself sometimes staring at an ad for a couple seconds before I realized it's not the description of the app I was trying to learn more about. From the advertisers perspective, I'm sure that's a good thing. It doesn't make users happy, though. I haven't tried Icy, either. I've heard it has a lot more technical issues as opposed to just user experience issues like Cydia. Also, I don't care how many apps end up on Rock Your Phone. I refuse to use it or apps that are only sold through it. I'm okay being close minded on this issue. I actually paid for Intelliscreen, then somebody got greedy and came up with RYP. Intelliborn stopped providing updates through Cydia and forced users to then install RockApp which at that time was EXTREMELY buggy and killed a lot of phones. Since Intelliscreen was already buggy with terrible support, I had no problem walking away and no longer recommending the app to others. Everybody already has either Icy or Cydia as part of the jailbreak process. Forcing users to use yet another app just to install something is ridiculous. It's a shame too, because I would probably buy MyWi if it were available on Cydia. Instead I'll most likely end up getting PDANet.
Sorry. Rant over. Some people don't seem to have any problem with RYP. I'm happy for them. I'm fairly sure I'm not the only one that refuses to on principle, though.
P.S. I haven't noticed any difference in battery usage since being jailbroken. What are all the apps you have installed? Also don't think stability is really any worse. There are some crashy apps on Cydia. But they can be avoided and it's not the fault of the jailbreak itself.
Hey Patrick,
One thing that is really nice is 'Notifier'. It puts little icons on the top-right corner of the status bar to tell you if you have missed calls/SMS/mail/etc. Its a nice way to see what you may have without having to unlock to the homescreen.
Also, PDAnet is great if you need tethering.
I double that. StatusNotifier is really cool
Their server's down or something at the moment. Wanted to have a look …
That seems a very reasonable rant. I would have major objections to that sort of scenario as well, and would likely just skip the app in question. Glad someone agrees on Cydia.
On stability I have to disagree for now. I've installed way over 150 apps on the 3GS via the App Store when running stock, and had exactly zero needed reboots and zero lock-ups that needed a hard reboot. Far more of each in just 7 days of jailbreak. Tolerable for now, but noticeable.
I agree. Since the day I upgraded my 3G to 3GS I had exactly 0 problems with stability or crashing. About five minutes after the jailbreak, I had to do a hard reset. I think it had to do with the Springboard Restart I had to do after installing some app so it wasn't a jailbreak problem exactly.
That said, I jailbroke both the original iphone and 3g and had so many problems with stability I restored after just a few days. I think the extra memory and speed of the 3GS have reduced a lot of the lag I saw in the first two phones. I haven't had any problems with stability this week, except the one noted above.
I also agree on the Cydia comments. I hate how the description is the last thing to load and sandwiched between ads, making it hard to find/read…
Glad to see some of you agree on Cydia. I honestly just feel like Installer was always a lot cleaner.
AndyM, Sebastien – will give that one a look then. Thanks.
One app from Cydia that I continue to jailbreak for is CallMe, it's free and allows you to have as many contacts' directly on your home pages for one touch dialing. I've got about six people I call a lot, so having the ability to select their icon and call them directly is great. I have no clue why it's not standard with the actual FW, and the commercial apps from the App Store are terrible.
Themes for Winterboard are nowhere near the level of beauty and design they were back in the 1.1.4 days.
With the 3GS, Voice Control has got me covered for quick dialing and no loss of home screen space. I've never been a big fan of icons for individual phone numbers either – I'd rather just assign Favorites to the home screen double press.
Totally agree on how much better themes seemed to be back in the 1.x days.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruRh3RKtl0g should say it all!
Good video – thanks for sharing it.
Thanks for this ;D
My pleasure.
glaskart is a nice theme and it is phone wide… even for texting as well. check it out
Yeah – I have and I now use this theme, and did a post about it: http://isource.com/iphone…