I'm Paul Jones

I'm afraid not, sadly. My nice shiny new iPhone 4 will be jailbreak free. Completely and utterly. To the point that I'm doing a full restore and not restoring my backup, as it contains some preferences and whatnot left over from the jailbreak of my previous 3G. The only thing that's being copied over is the record of my 6,200 SMS messages that I've built up over the course of 3 years, and I'm doing that by plucking out the file from one of my old backups and then dropping it into a new backup and restoring from that.

It sounds long-winded, and it is, but I want this new iPhone to be completely untouched by the taint of jailbreaking. It just isn't worth the hassle any more. All the flaws that used to require a jailbreak seem to have been fixed by Apple nowadays. MMS, Copy/Paste, multitasking. It's all covered. Even the notification thing isn't major any more since fast app switching means you can reply to a text and be back playing angry birds in 2 seconds.

Quick summary: After 3 years of iPhone ownership the reasons to jailbreak have been reducing gradually. At this point I don't believe the benefits outweigh the hassles of avoiding updates, software glitches, extra fiddling and having to restore if I ever have a problem with the phone.

Update: Copying the SMS record from my old backup to the new one didn't work, it seems there's some kind of checksumming done on the backup as a whole entity rather than the individual components. On the plus side though I have noticed a massive improvement in battery life. I'm getting through a full day with ~60% left consistently. Which is nice.

There's a new iPhone coming, and it probably won't be jailbroken straight away. That means that if I want to get a new fancy iPhone, and not my current old slow iPhone with a plastic back that will end up with cracks in it within 12 months (I'm on my second) then I'll need to make do without a jailbreak for a month or so.

So it got me to thinking: Can I survive with a regular locked down iPhone, and what would I miss if I had to go without the wonders of Cydia?

SBsettings: This is the first thing that came to my mind. SBsettings lets me toggle my Wifi, 3G, Bluetooth and Tethering on or off without having to open the settings app. Just swipe the status bar and tap. Job done. It means I can just switch on Wifi when I need it instead of it draining my battery all the time. I think I'll miss it the most out of all the modifications.

Installous: 'What about all my free apps?' I thought. Then I checked, and I don't actually have any cracked apps installed at all. None. Every single app that deserved a permanent space on my home screen also deserved my money. So that's not really an issue then, especially since more games have free lite versions these days anyway.

YourTube: This adds an extra tab to the YouTube app that let's you download YouTube videos and play them back when you're without 3G. It's nice to have, but nothing on YouTube is really essential so I'll just go ahead and move on to the next one.

Notifier: Adds little icons to the status bar at the top when you have new emails, texts and missed calls, or when you switch your phone to silent. Great for being able to quickly check your phone, especially if there's more than one update. It's becoming less useful these days though since I'm just as likely to have a notification from Meebo, Facebook, Tweetie or We Rule, noe of which have pretty little icons.

QuickReply: Possibly my favourite extension so far. When you get a text it adds a Reply button to the notification. Tap it and it brings up an overlay so you can reply without leaving your current app. Never again will I curse people for talking to me when I'm trying to kill pigs with birds. Except now I will again, because it'll be gone come Saturday.

5 Icon Dock: The dock on my iPhone has 5 icons. I know what you're thinking: 4 is the maximum! Not with this hack though. It means I can have Phone, Mail, Messages, Meebo and Tweetie all on my dock at once. It's marvellous. I'll miss it, but I can live with having to find Tweetie on the first page.

... And this would be where I was expecting to continue listing all the different jailbreak apps I've got on my phone. Apps like Winterboard and the various emulators. But I don't have them. Winterboard seemed to crash my iPhone far too much to make it worthwhile, and games that aren't designed for the iPhone control terribly when shoehorned onto the touch interface, so I'd never really bothered with emulators.

I guess I won't miss it that much after all, except for my less than official tethering, but again, I've only used it twice, and ocne was to show off that I could. The other time was to test it was working.

This was originally going to be a post about my favourite jailbreak apps, and I suppose it still is, there's just less of them. If you prefer you can change the title to '7 deadly apps that Apple don't want you to have' or something fancy like that.