Verizon iPhone Is Now Jailbreakable

An anonymous reader writes "The Chronic Dev Team have rolled out Greenpoison RC5_4 aka Greenpois0n RC5 b4 for both the Mac and Windows platform, which brings untethered jailbreak for the Verizon iPhone." Since 500k iPhones were sold on the first day it'll be interesting to see how Verizon throttles users.

Comments

Remember, not illegal!

[Skarecrow77]

Go for it guys! Jailbreak your iphone all you want, completely legal! Ruled as such by the Library of Congress! ... why doing the exact same thing to the black sony box setting next to my tv isn't legal, I'll never understand.

Re:Remember, not illegal!

[natehoy]

Just to play devil's advocate here, why should lock-down not be permitted?

No, really. There are plenty of devices that you can buy that are not locked down. Most of the Nokia line offers non-locked-down phones. There are a decent handful of Android devices. Blackberries are generally available in an unlocked flavor.

Yes, they are more expensive, but that's because you aren't being subsidized by a damned phone company when you get it. It's your phone, and all the features belong to you. The phone company can't turn off your GPS like Verizon likes to. They can't turn off the WiFi like AT&T likes to. You put their SIM in the phone and you use it for what you want to use it for, and pay accordingly.

AT&T seems to welcome unlocked GSM phones (admittedly, their discount for using an unlocked unsubsidized phone is nonexistent, and they'll still force you on a data plan for certain phones whether locked or unlocked). From what I've heard, Sprint not only loves 'em, they offer a discount. There aren't as many unlocked phones available for Verizon, since they are LTE and the rest of the world is pretty much GSM, but it's not like there aren't offerings for unlocked phones.

It's only the fact that we USAians are so used to having our phones subsidized that we've forgotten there is a whole universe of unlocked phones out there that we can use, if we want to get off the mobile carrier teat and buy them ourselves.

Re:Remember, not illegal!

[SuricouRaven]

"I always wonder who these folks are that want to jailbreak for purposes other than unlocking."

Emulators. Apple strictly prohibits any app from running or emulating, or executing in any way, code that hasn't been Apple approved. A lot of people like their retro gaming. Jailbreak a mobile and you can run emulators on it. A NES or SNES in your pocket. Or a gameboy - it's smaller than the original. Aside from that... pirate apps, various wireless network utilities Apple prohibits due to their potential hacking uses, and the big one: Tethering.

Re:Remember, not illegal!

[betterunixthanunix]

I always wonder who these folks are that want to jailbreak for purposes other than unlocking

How about to keep features that are arbitrarily taken away? I used to use my phone as a dialup modem, low bandwidth but enough to fetch some email, which is all I really want. My phone broke; my new phone is programmed to always say "CARRIER ERROR" when I try to use the modem feature. I am not paying less, and when I demanded an explanation, I was told that only people deploying telemetry devices or doing government work were allowed to use their phones in that manner, and that I should just sign up for mobile broadband.

There is no technical reason for this restriction; jailbreaking can remove it. Why would I not jailbreak? The phone still has a built-in modem, the network still supports it, and the carrier is still going to get paid (since I use minutes just like I would for a voice call).

Re:Remember, not illegal!

[elrous0]

Because Sony has more lobbying money to bribe Congress?

Re:Remember, not illegal!

[Iphtashu Fitz]

There are plenty of reasons to jailbreak. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of apps available through Cydia that Apple doesn't allow on their App Store for one reason or another. Many of those apps are simply not in line with the way Steve Jobs and his employees think your phone should be allowed to operate.

Case in point - an app called iBlacklist that lets you set up filters for incoming phone calls and test messages. If you block an incoming phone call you can choose to have it go straight to voicemail, get a busy signal, simply pick up & hang up, etc. Very handy if you ever get harassing phone calls from people you don't want to hear from (like sales & marketing people, etc)

Then there's RemindYou, which is an app that displays your upcoming calendar events on the screen every time you pick up your phone. Very handy for people who live by their Outlook or iCal schedules.

Nettalk adds Apple's network file sharing protocol to your iPhone, making it much easier to transfer files to/from the phone instead of having to rely on iTunes. It effectively turns your iPhone into a large thumb drive.

Those are just a couple examples of apps that many people want and find extremely useful, but Steve Jobs and Apple say you can't have. So by jailbreaking your phone you can tell Apple to bugger off and install these apps anyway.

Re:Remember, not illegal!

[magusxxx]

You are only supposed to use your computer in the manner dictated to you by its manufacturer

So that's why I got a cease and desist from TI when I turned my calculator upside down and spelt BOOBS.

Re:Remember, not illegal!

[natehoy]

The real question is, why should we not be allowed to disable their restriction systems and use the computers we buy in any manner we see fit?

It's a condition of the subsidy.

If you choose to have someone else pay for all or part of your telephone, how is it suddenly patently unfair that you have to live by the terms you agreed to when you accepted the subsidy? You had the choice of buying your own phone without the subsidy and the restrictions.

I'm sympathetic to your point of view, but you did accept a discount in return for your vendor-locked phone. The restrictions are part of the package you seem to have agreed to.

That's why my wife's phone is an unlocked one. Sure, it cost us more money up front, but we don't need a data plan for her smartphone (it's got WiFi, and she just uses data only when she's at home). We don't need a navigation plan for her GPS (it's got a GPS and mapping software with downloadable maps, so she doesn't need data to navigate). We only need a voice + SMS plan from AT&T, so that's what we bought. They hand us a SIM, we install the SIM in the phone, we turn off data from that SIM on the phone and tell AT&T to block data from their end, we place a test call, and we sign a month-to-month voice/SMS contract, shake the hand of the AT&T salescritter, and walk out the door with a working phone.

If AT&T pisses us off, we go to someone else and get their SIM installed in my wife's phone instead.

Sure, the phone cost us $250 and we could have gotten it for free. But we get to use ALL of the phone, not just the features that AT&T wants us to use. AT&T is merely providing voice for the phone. There's a second SIM slot so I could go out and buy a pay-per-use data plan if my wife really wanted one.

Re:Sales figures

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Verizon stopped taking pre-orders in less than a day because they couldn't handle the volume. How can you claim this is a peak day of sales when it's just pre-orders? The phone isn't even available in retail stores yet, it won't be until Thursday. Just wait and see what the sales figures are after then, and in the days/weeks to follow.

Oh yeah, and the 1.4 billion number you mentioned is world-wide. Last I checked, Verizon isn't a global phone provider. If there had been 1.4 billion phones sold just in the USA then every man, woman, and child in the country would have 4.5 mobile phones. Try comparing the sales figures to just US sales and it's just a little bit more impressive.

Re:Can you hear me ....bzzz.... CARRIER LOST

[natehoy]

We'll see, the iPhone doesn't tend to pull "mobile" sites like most other phones do, it pulls the entire real site and renders it down to a smaller screen. Blackberries, for example, tend to load preview versions of images by going through BES or BIS, and this is a lot more gentle on mobile bandwidth. I use my Blackberry 83xx (EDGE) all the time, and I have yet to break an average of about 1-2 megabytes per day. Now, admittedly, I don't use a lot of streaming media (would suck over EDGE anyway), but I use Google Maps, corporate and personal email, Gmail, Facebook, and a decent amount of web browsing. And I have yet to break 40 megabytes in a whole month. My phone does not have WiFi, so every bit it gets comes through the mobile network.

Email is done via IMAP and seems to pull entire emails down, not just the first few kilobytes with a "view more" option like the Blackberry's built in email solution.

The iPhone is, in terms of data usage, a pretty inefficient phone. That's not to say it's a bad phone, in fact it looks pretty cool, but its data usage is more computer-like and less phone-like than many other smartphones. There was also some mention about it turning the radio on and off aggressively, which gave it more frequencies on the tower than it really should have had (but saved battery life). I don't know if that problem has been fixed, or even if it was just some bad rumor, but if true that would have a negative effect on any network it operated on.

Having said all that, in at least one way I agree. Verizon is limiting the iPhone to its 3G network, which does not allow simultaneous voice and data (similar to AT&T's 2G EDGE network, but with faster data). If you make a call, your data connection will be interrupted for the duration. If you send or receive SMS/MMS, your data connection will also be interrupted (though for a very short duration).

Contrast this to AT&T where you can be talking on the phone and surfing the web at the same time, something the iPhone happens to be really good at (and if my Blackberry supported it and 3G speeds, I'd probably be gobbling up a lot more monthly bandwidth than I do today, even with all the BES/BIS compression that goes on).

That means the potential impact to Verizon's network is cut nearly in half, because the VeriPhone can only do one thing at a time, whereas the ATTiPhone can do both at the same time. A single phone will have a much lower impact to a given tower on Verizon, because it can't do as much at the same time.

I still think Verizon is going to see some significant hits once the AT&T iPhone defectors start hitting them in droves. Which is great, because I'm on AT&T. The Verizon network is welcome to 'em. :)

I'm still waiting for the reports from early VeriPhone adopters. Verizon caught a LOT of flack in the 8000-series days (a few years ago) when they announced that they were locking down the GPS radios in all 8000-series Blackberries unless you bought their TeleNav service, and even then you could ONLY use the GPS for their TeleNav service and nothing else (that was a very large part of the reason I went AT&T with my 8300, because a smartphone without a GPS is like a bicycle without pedals). I hope Apple has a lot more clout and won't allow Verizon to pull that on their iPhone customers, because that would be a real shame.

Re:is there any value in JB'ing your iphone?

[Conception]

There is value but if you don't use the items that have value, then for you, no.

I just use a few things in jailbreak... If these sound interesting, then there is value for you.

1) Replacement SMS app - Let's you do things like reply from the SMS notification instead of having to unlock your phone, open the messaging app, and then send on.
2) Tethering and Hot Spotting - Let me and others use my phone as a mobile access point.
3) Auto3g - Disables 3g when the phone is locked so it uses far less battery power. Doubles battery life for me.
4) Lockscreen replacement - Makes my lock screen have calendar information. It also does stuff like remind me if I haven't acknowledged an event and sets quiet hours for SMS and stuff like that.
5) Application Backups - If you have to restore your phone, all your saved games and information on the phone is gone.
6) SMS export - Let's me archive and delete my SMS messages.
7) Unlock - Useful when traveling abroad.
8) Notification Replacement - Gives me Growl (the program) like notifications.
9) SBSettings - Which is free, is just nice to be able to turn certain things off and on with a quick swipe. Also, fixes the status bar to have things like the date.

If there is no value in these things for you, then no, don't jailbreak your phone.