The “Thin Lizzy” iPhone Debate: Jailbreak

This isn’t a product or app review this time, this is more of an opinion piece I suppose. What ever it is, it’s about the choice to Jailbreak your iPhone, or not. For the longest time, I was one of those people who didn’t want to chance the possibility of hurting the phone in some way where I would brick the unit, or void the warranty. I stayed away from it, and left the iPhone as Apple intended it to be. When I upgraded to the 3GS last July, I decided to Jailbreak the 3G and try it out for myself.

I found some invaluable tools with Jailbreaking. The ability to run apps in the background is a huge reason to do it. Also, customization of the spring board, or a blacklist feature for texts and calls… I can go on and on. There’s a million reasons to do it. I decided to take the plunge an open up my 3GS and enjoy it’s full potential.

I was at an ugly impasse. On one hand, opening up the phone to so many new features is hard to argue against, but Jailbreaking had one major flaw for me… My phones performance suffered greatly. It was less responsive, the battery life would drain much faster, and I had frequent crashes and buggy happenings. I had no choice but to restore back to factory settings.

I thought, perhaps it was something I did, and tried the process again, on both my 3G as well as the two 3GS units I own… They all act the same way for me. So again, a restore on all the units, back to factory default.

Now, I’m not one to preach one way or another. People like to argue back and forth about what you should do, and in the end, it’s 100% your own decision. For me, I LOVED the capabilities of a jailbroken iPhone, but I could not let the performance of the phone suffer for it. I use the iPhone daily, almost as a lifeline. It’s always at my side, taking care of most things I needed my computer for. I need it to work as it’s intended to work, and be reliable, especially when it’s already crippled on the AT&T network. I have enough frustration with dropping calls in my area, the last thing I need is frustration while the phone lags in general use.

Hopefully with future updates, the performance issues I have experienced will be a thing of the past, and I can once again go the way of Thin Lizzy. But until then, I’m more then happy with the solid performance of the UI.