Semi-tethered iOS5 Jailbreak out

Less than a month after Apple Inc. launched its latest operating system for mobile devices, iOS 5, developers have come up with a way to jailbreak it semi-tethered. The author of the latest jailbreak, BigBoss, said the latest version of his tool - 0.7.9 - may be useful for owners of jailbroken iPhones who are on the road. "What is semitethered jailbreak and why do you care? In short, it is protection for if your device reboots while you’re on the road," BigBoss said. He noted the current jailbreak for iOS 5 is tethered, meaning a jailbroken phone that has trouble booting will have to be booted with the help of a PC. If the device crashes and reboots while the user is out on the road, there is not much the user can do. BigBoss said his version should fix issues such as:

• Device does not sync with iTunes
• Device reboots after 2-3 minutes

But he admitted his jailbreak for now could not fix a problem with app syncing. So far, he said the update was only tested on an iPhone 4, but they plan to test more devices in the coming days. Semi-tethered While the semi-tethered jailbreak will allow one to reboot on the road, it will have limited functionality. "It is enough that you are no longer stranded, and you can use your phone, text, and many other features. This is just until you get home and can use redsn0w again to 'just boot tethered.' Once you do that, you’re back to fully functional state," he said. A summary of can and can'ts includes:

• Can use phone, SMS (text messages)
• Can use every other stock app on iPhone.
• Cannot use mobile Safari
• Can use other App Store web browsers such as Atomic Web Browser
• Cannot use mail app, though one can install a Gmail app
• Cannot use any jailbreak tweak, app, Cydia until you boot tethered.

BigBoss also said a user in semi-tether booted state should not add a jailbreak iOS 5 notification such as sbsettings to notifications. Otherwise, the device will be stuck in a respring loop until one gets home to “boot tethered." Caveats Other caveats to installing this package include: - The device will take longer to boot up. - There are some “problems" to reloading all daemons on the fly. This is why mobile substrate installation requires “reboot device" in Cydia. "I believe the good outweigh the bad here. Once the untethered jailbreak is out, you will not need or want to install this semitether package. In future iOS versions when we are back to having only a tethered jailbreak, you should be able to install this again to semitether your jailbreak," BigBoss said. — TJD, GMA News