I finally got time away from my busy schedule and decided to jailbreak my iPhone 3GS and see what the fuss is all about. I really wanted to do this, not only because I would have the opportunity to have alot of free apps but also for the fun of it.

Unfortunately I had upgraded to the latest OS 4, and there is no stable jailbreak as far as I am concerned, so I had the huge task of finding out how to downgrade to os 3.1.3. Well, as you could have imagined, apple did not intend for you or me to go back to a previous operating system,so this process in its entirely is a hack! It is like making a deal with the devil, there is no way out!

Now, downgrading for me was perhaps the most hectic thing I did last weekend (trying to make lasagne came a close 2nd ) at one point during this operation I was convinced that I had bricked my phone and I had already started mourning, I reached out under my bed to fetch my beloved Nokia 5800, as I was ready to chuck the iPhone out of the window. After reading a dozen or so of the many tutorials online, I come across a few useful tools. First one being recboot (google is your friend) this helped me kick the phone out of recovery loop(again google is your friend) and blackra1n, this did the jailbreaking. after all that was done, i installed cydia shortly followed by ultrasn0w for carrier unlock.

The process took me the entire day, mainly because I did not finish any of the tutorials and quickly jumped onto the download section. If only I realised that my 3gs had the newboot ROM, which meant that the normal jailbreaking procedure did not apply. If i knew this, then I could have spent 15min max doing this.

Right now I am glad to report that the jailbreak was successful, I have quite a lot of apps, some of which I have not even used, not even once, and others that i have used every day! There is one thing I have noticed though, my battery has

taken a real liking for the charger and does not seem to hold more than 50% by mid-day, all this just under “light” usage. I clearly remember going back home with atleast 45% charge before the jailbreak. It is like hiding in a trench for saftey just to realise you are knee deep in shit!

This is not a step-by-step guide incase you didnt realise, its just a snapshot of my eventful Sunday evening, so watch out for the next post, where I will put a definitive guide to jailbreaking!