I was one of the first people to get the first iphone.  The funny thing is, I really did not want it.  I was attending a conference that got a special deal to buy the first batch of phones.  $600.  Ug.  I was going to sell it after the conference, only to have the price drop on me.  So as I fought with AT&T to get my $200, I found that it was not bad… Then came jailbreak and everything changed.

I was a treo 650 user for a long time.  Loaded all kinds of cool games, had it connected to a remote bluetooth GPS so that I had voice and visual directions, and of course could surf the web, hacked it so I can take movies.  It was good.  Then came the jailbroken iphone.  Amazing. And I have never looked back.

In the early days of jailbreaking, you could take movies, record sounds, get your location on the map (it used cell tower doppler, but better then nothing) change the background.. heck change lots of elements of the UI, play Quake (Yes Play Quake!), default screen with email, weather sms, custom ringtones, sweet 3D racing games, play guitar, even remote access to my desktop.  It was the first time I truly felt like I had a computer that was also a phone, instead of a phone that I was trying to use like a computer. Further, the experience was so much smoother, so refined that it was actually a pleasure to use.  Something I’ve never experienced with other phones. And I loved showing it off.  Back when the phone was only a few months old, I found that if I ever took it out for any reason, I would be doing yet another demo once people saw it in my hand.

And now here we are five years later.  Many of the things we did back in the version 1 jailbreak days we take for granted now, but even still, I cannot use my iphone for more then 5 days without having to jailbreak because there are still so many great features and functions that jailbreaking offers.  I still keep a list of my 10 ten jailbreak apps for iphone, but with each OS update, I find fewer and fewer reasons to rejailbreak my phone after an update.

Just for fun, I found a REALLY old post when I was just starting to write about the phone where I listed my favorite apps. Can you guess which ones still need jailbreak? 🙂  BTW, just for fun I went looking for the oldest pic I took with an iphone. Have not found it yet, but here is once from Oct 2007 that was my background for 4 years. (at the end of the post)

• IntelliScreen. I wrote about this app before. Its sweet.
• SMBPref. MUST have. Get this first in fact. Although I use the blueprint theme, the hello kitty theme rocks!
• address book search by polarbearfarm. A must have if you have a large address book.
• voicenotes. More useful then you think. I use it during brainstorming session that sometimes happen at random times.
• sketches. Not great pressure recognition, but useful at times, and shaking the screen clear is fun.
• snapture. I like the detail control you have over the camera. Can be useful in low light situations
• Customize. Does not seem to work past v1.1.2 🙁
• ebook reader. There are many. You would be surprised, but its quite readable if you do not read for more then say an hour.
• there are a number of twitter clinets out there. I use mobile twitter because its the fastest I’ve seen. Although twitxr looks kinda cool
• Chess. Nuff said
• guitarist. if you play guitar, this will be fun.
• Band. This is quite an impressive effort. Its not ready yet, but you can download many instruments. Once they have it where you can record multitrack style and punch in and out, then we will have something here.
• BossPrefs. I use the basic one to quickly turn services on and off when I need to save power, I also keep ssh off, and bossprefs makes it easy to turn back on when I need it.
• RagingThunder. The coolest racing game for the iphone. period. Get it!
• VideoRecorder. VERY impressive. Lots of controls for light, sound, compression
• VNsea. I use this to VNC to my linux box late at night when I have long jobs running. Great!
• Pool. Nuff said.
• ssh support. If you know what I’m talking about, then odds are you will figure this out yourself.