Lifehacker's 13 iPhone/iPod Touch apps worth 'œjailbreaking' for

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 04 June 2008 08:46

Your IT - Mobility

Hey, Apple’s App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch are due in 6 days, but who knows what apps will be available on day one? After all, Apple will be very strict, but why wait, when you can jailbreak now and have some pre-app store fun?

If you’ve been a more serious user of your iPhone or iPod Touch, chances are you’ve already “jailbroken” your iPhone to either allow unlocking so any GSM SIM card can be used, or you’ve jailbroken to allow to installation of a whole host of interesting programs for both of Apple’s handheld computers.

Of course, if you haven’t, you might just decide to wait until Apple launches the new 2.0 iPhone/iPod Touch firmware, to be on the safe side.

But given that Apple is charging for the iPod Touch 2.0 firmware and hackers will likely still need some time to figure out how to unlock the iPhone 2.0 firmware, you could still be waiting for some time, and there are some great apps out there which, as Lifehacker puts it, are “worth jailbreaking for”. 

And remember, you can always synchronise the data on your iPhone or iPod Touch, data that iTunes can synchronise at any rate, and then restore your iPhone or iPod Touch back to ‘original’ status if needed, although any new firmware update should automatically do that for you, should you choose to run it.

So jailbreaking your device isn’t dangerous, and the are plenty of guides online that show you how to do it, although the simplest way of all is to download the free ZiPhone software which can jailbreak both the iPhone and iPod Touch, and unlock the iPhone as well if desired, for both PCs and Macs.

So, what are the 13 must-have apps that Lifehacker is recommending to try?

There’s Websearch, a program which “creates quick search shortcuts for any web site on the Internet.”

Second up is iFlix for managing “your entire Netflix queue from the comfort of your iPhone, from adding, re-ordering, and browsing Netflix”, although for anyone outside of the US this one’s a bit pointless.

No.3 is iSlsk. This is a “Soulseek peer-to-peer client that can download MP3s from the Soulseek network and import the music directly into the iPod application” – although this one sounds even more potentially illegal than the act of unlocking your iPhone or iPod Touch in the first place! We don’t advocate piracy here at iTWire, so use this one at your own risk. That said any unlocking or jailbreaking you do is at your own risk, too.

After that comes MobileScrobbler. This one “integrates your iPod's music library with music recommendation service Last.fm so that each time you play a song on your device, it's automatically sent to Last.fm over your Wi-Fi or EDGE connection”.

Please read on to page 2 for the rest of the Lifehacker list of iPhone/iPod Touch must-haves.