For a while now I’ve been encouraging people to jailbreak their iPhones. And for a while now I’ve found myself without a good answer when they ask, “Why should I?”
Thanks to ZiPhone it’s not a difficult operation, but the payoff to replacing the little AT&T logo with your name isn’t enough to overcome the fear most people feel when they contemplate fiddling with their shiny new status symbol’s brains. I think it’s worth it: the Terminal app is incredibly handy if you’re the sort of person who regularly has to SSH into their own laptop to manually kill a runaway process. But there aren’t too many people who fit that description. Tinyproxy, which can theoretically provide emergency internet for your laptop over the phone’s cell connection, is a comforting safety blanket. But of course the connection is incredibly slow, and it takes a good five minutes to complete the necessary configuration on the laptop and phone prior to each use, and it didn’t work at all the last time I needed it.
But lo! There’s finally a reason to unlock your phone that doesn’t include pornographic videogames or touchscreen guitar simulations: IntelliScreen, which adds weather, email, calendar and other notifications to your phone’s lock screen. It’s pretty nice; give it a try.