Jailbreak

The Electronic Frontiter Foundation (EFF), an electronic rights activist group, has recently labeled the iPhone and iPad app ecosystem as a "crystal prison" for developers and end-users. The EFF's main justifications for this conclusion include Apple's content filters, restrictions on code usage (like ones tapping into AirPlay uninvited), and limiting developers to using Apple's payment infrastructure (though some devs seem pretty happy with the current set-up).

Just jailbreak iOS 5.1.1 on your iPhone and iPad and looking for the very best apps, tweaks, and other enhancements to try out? With jailbreak comes Cydia, the jailbreak app store, and an amazing amount of software simply unavailable inside Apple's App Store. But which ones are the best? Which are the top jailbreak apps you simply have to try out right now?

Below you'll find iMore's favorite productivity enhancements, Notification Center enhancements, Messaging enhancements, customization and theme engines, and a lot of extras.

The Absinthe 2.0 jailbreak is now responsible for jailbreaking more than 1.2 million devices since its release on Friday. The Absinthe 2.0 jailbreak lets you enjoy an untethered jailbreak on your device running Apple’s latest 5.1.1 firmware. It supports nearly every iOS device including the just released iPad 3 and is available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Now that the iOS 5.1.1 jailbreak is available for the iPhone 4S, new iPad, and older devices, the subject of jailbreak in general is getting a lot of attention again, and with it, the dark side of jailbreaking. It seems whenever someone wants to attack the very concept of jailbreak, one of the first salvos unleashed is app piracy. The sad, ugly truth is that those attacks are made possible because some people who jailbreak do so mainly or entirely to get "free" apps. And the sadder, uglier truth is that there's no such thing as "free". Everything has a cost. Even and especially theft.

Absinthe 2.0 has launched and it provides support for a fully unthethered jailbreak under iOS 5.1.1 (and only iOS 5.1.1) for the following devices:

• iPad, iPad 2, new iPad (except the 2012 iPad 2, which will come later)
• iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S
• iPod touch 3, iPod touch 4

Developed by a collaborative "Dream Team" between Chronic-Dev Team and iPhone Dev Team, Absinthe 2.0 and promises to be so easy, your "grandma could do it." Here are the steps:

The untethered iOS 5.1.1 jailbreak should be released in just a matter of days according to a tweet by pod2g. Many people have been eagerly awaiting an untethered jailbreak for the latest version of iOS 5.1.1. It has taken a while for it to even look possible never mind become available.

RIM has only just begun previewing BlackBerry 10 and already features like the on-key, gesture-based word prediction are being quickly copied for the iPhone -- at least for jailbreak. Octopus Keyboard is the name of the tweak, and Jeff Benjamin from iDownloadBlog took a look at its current state of development.

As of now the Octopus keyboard can do the following:

Another year has gone by and with it has come a wealth of jailbreak apps, hacks, and tweaks that we here at iMore hope to see end up in iOS 6. We had a similar jailbreak to iOS want list before iOS 5 was released and luckily a lot of the things we really wanted, Apple delivered or at least touched on. Here's what we hope to see surface in iOS 6 that jailbreakers have access to right now.