It is pretty much a no-brainer to hear news that the recently released iPhone OS 4.0 firmware update has been officially jailbroken by the iPhone Dev Team, alongside video evidence to put to bed naysayers as well as skeptics. Why bother to jailbreak your iPhone this time round since multitasking has been introduced officially? Well, perhaps there are still other minor benefits for doing so, but at least one strong argument has been shot down. For those who have already jailbroken their latest iPhone firmware update, how do you find it performing?
Apple has unveiled its new iPhone OS 4 with a ton of new features including a “smart” multitasking, iBooks and an ad networks – that’s only the highlights.
Multitasking
To limit battery draining by apps running in the background, like it is happening with Android phones, Apple has limited the number of operating system (OS) services that apps can access in the background to seven: Audio, VoIP, Location, Push Notifications, Local Notifications, Task Completion, Fast App Switching. Fast App Switching allows to freeze the apps and to restore them quickly when you switch back, thus avoid a complete reload. That should be called multi-mono-task, maybe? Local Notifications can be sent directly from apps on the iPhone without requiring an external server like today’s Notifications (it’s easier for developers). If a status update happens in an app running in the background, you will receive a notification. On the Voice over-IP side (VOIP), you will be able to continue a conversation over VoIP (Skype for example) while checking other applications (Calendar…). The Location Services power consumption is limited by switching from GPS (accurate to 3 meters) to cell towers (accurate to 200m or so). An icon on the main screen tells the user which mode the phone is in, clever! The addition of App Folders with drag and drop is great: now I will be able to organize my apps better (games, news…). Check the multitasking video in the full post.
When he was 17, George Hotz poured hundreds of hours of his summer vacation into a special project: learning the iPhone’s secrets [working with the Dev-Team]. His unpaid labor eventually paid off. With the help of a soldering iron, he was the first to unlock the iPhone [publicly, and against the agreement made with the Dev-Team] delivering the handset to international networks before Apple had a chance to.
He got some perks, too. His unlock catapulted him to internet stardom, catching the eye of an entrepreneur who traded his Nissan 350Z car for Hotz’s restriction-free iPhone. Hotz, now 20, makes a living as a “hacker for hire” of sorts — getting paid to break into different types of gadgets. He gets to spend his free time unofficially attending a college [Google University], where he pretends to be a student just to socialize. 
What’s best, Hotz didn’t think unlocking the iPhone was even hard. Continue reading »
There is a cool new app for the iPhone that allows you to take pictures and make them look like a Lego mosaic.
