First impressions of jailbreak on the iPad 2
Thanks to Bryan, the news that the iPad 2 has gotten an untethered jailbreak (which happened a few weeks ago) finally reached me too. I’ve been against – or rather not interested in – jailbreaking in the past, wanting the stock experience for what was then a productivity tool for me. With my education being over (at least for now) and that aspect of iPad use gone, I jumped on the chance to get something new to play with – and write about. I downloaded Absinthe, connected my iPad 2, and waited until it was done – a process that took longer for my than for Bryan due to all the stuff on my iPad.
Having played with the jailbroken iPad for a bit now, I have to say that not much has changed since the last time I jailbroke an iOS device. Cydia is still pretty much customization software that looks like it has been made in Microsoft Paint, which is actually a bad thing to have there at all because it hides all the actually useful software that you get with jailbreak. There are a few attempts to highlight the goodies here and there, but when you have to scroll though a couple of dozen apps that contain the word statusbar to get to the USB utility you wanted when searching for “usb”, it’s pretty obvious that the search engine could use a little tweaking.
As for stability, well, nothing much has changed there either. The iPad 2 is a lot faster than the last device I jailbroke, but the basic issues of jailbreaking are still there. Some random hangs here and there, weird bugs like the music icon going white for a couple of resprings, and the need to respring at all – which means reload Springboard, iOS’ homescreen/launcher. Jailbreaking iOS is sort of like having “Android duct tape edition”: you accomplish a lot of the same things, but with a few more bumps in the road to get there as a result of a bigger part of it being “unofficial”.
I knew of a few pieces of software I wanted to try, so expect to see some articles on things like mounting USB drives and getting higher resolution iPhone apps in the coming days. Overall though, I haven’t found anything completely revolutionary, which is what I expected, and why I was never really that bothered with the lack of an iPad 2 jailbreak to begin with.
