"Untethered" iPhone Jailbreak Out Now

The hacker coalition known as the iPhone Dev-Team has released a new jailbreak for iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G and iPad users running – an updated version of redsn0w. What’s so special about this update? It has, at long last, delivered the much-anticiapted “untethered” jailbreak which means that after jailbreaking your iPhone, you can reboot the device at will, without having it physically connected to your computer.

However, a word of warning to the potential jailbreakers out there – we wouldn’t advise you to take the plunge just yet.

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Untethered! But Still in Beta…

Over the Christmas weekend, the iPhone Dev Team released a version of redsn0w (0.9.7) which implements the untethered jailbreak to daring beta testers. This was not a general release and is still very bug-ridden.

At present, the jailbreak only works on Mac computers. It also specifies several additional technical requirements including things like running usbmuxd software on your Mac and having your 4.2b3 SHSH blobs backed up in Cydia, for example.

If you have no idea what that’s referring to, this clearly isn’t the jailbreak for you – at least, not yet. Wait for the general release instead.

What’s Broken

The first iteration of the software disabled Bluetooth functionality and crashed apps. The second beta fixed the native app crashing, including Task Switcher, but did not re-enable Bluetooth. The third update, the latest one available now, fixes more bugs to address problems with FaceTime, Winterboard and embedded videos in iTunes.

If you’re feeling brave, you can test the redsn0w beta now, following the same general instructions as before with the tethered jailbreak. (RedmondPie has instructions).

But because this is a testing version only, we don’t want to recommend you try it yourself, unless you’re technically savvy, have your phone backed up and are well aware of the implications. For those reasons, we won’t be posting a detailed how-to guide just yet. Stay tuned!

If you have tried the untethered jailbreak, though, let us know how it went in the comments.

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