If you’ve ever jailbroken your iPhone in the last months, you know how much of a necessity the freedom of an independent third-party alternative can be. The guys involved in cracking Apple’s continous efforts to fortify the box their customers agree to be locked in have been doing excessively great. Whenever Apple released a new firmware version in beta, they were on the case trying to get around the various protections to allow users the freedom to choose. They would do so impressively fast, too. Now, with iPhoneOS 3.1, Apple decided to up the ante.
Should you decide to update your pre-3.1 device to 3.1, Apple will make it so that not only does it wipe your jailbreak data, but make it nearly impossible for the user to manipulate the device in the future. As it is a highly technical subject, I’ll simply direct you to Jay “saurik” Freeman’s article which covers everything you need to know about this particular topic.
That being said, there’s a hard reality out there. 3.1 is out, and iPhone owners want their devices — may they be jailbroken or vanilla — to run the latest firmware. It’s absolutely normal, and even encouraged. Nowadays, you need to stay on top of software updates for security purposes, if anything. To that reality, you can add the current problem those people have: you can’t jailbreak 3.1. Today, I’m going to enumerate the possibilities that lay before you as a jailbroken iPhone owner who wants to update to 3.1.There are, as of today, numerous options to hack up your device, some are unstable, some are experimental, some are widely recognized as official. Here’s a list for easy reference:
As of the moment I’m writing these lines, there is one “official” way to jailbreak your device to 3.1… as long as you run MacOS X. The tool which the iPhone Dev-Team released, PwnageTool, is currently only supported on Macintosh platforms. That’s a bummer for the rest of us. If you do run a Mac, you’re lucky and can jailbreak like you always did.
The other ways are for the rest of us non-Apple fanboys. You’ll be happy to know it’s surprisingly simple. In order to jailbreak your iPhone with 3.1 on Windows, simply obtain a custom firmware generated by PwnageTool. Be very careful what IPSW you get as you can get fucked (yes, fucked) really easily. Ask your friends, I’m sure one of them has a Mac! Once you have the custom IPSW file, restore your iPhone (hold down the shift key as you click on iTunes’ “Restore” button to browse for your custom firmware). Should you have problems (error 1601, 1602, 1604), use ih8sn0w’s iReb application to fix it.
Then, when your iPhone will be fully restored using the new firmware, you have nothing else to do, just enjoy. Wasn’t that simple? If you’re looking to be carrier-independent…. well you can’t just yet. We’re still waiting on a release of untrasn0w, greenpois0n or whichever will come first.
See Altaf Sayani’s great articles about it here and here.
March 10th, 2010 at 6:15 am
yea important info