What does it mean to jailbreak your iPod touch?

What does it mean to "jailbreak an ipod touch/iphone?"?

• I've seen alot questions about jailbreaking an ipod touch or an iphone. What does that mean??? I'm getting an ipod touch soon, so please help me.

• Answer:

  I'm cutting and pasting an answer I said to another question that was exactly the same... Also since you're getting an ipod touch soon keep in mind the new ones are 2nd generation and they cannot be jailbroken. Cut & Paste Beginning ... ------------------------------------ First off, you can't jailbreak the new iPod Touch (they still haven't figured out how to do so to the 2nd generation touch). But you can jailbreak the older first generation. Here's the scenario.... You want to buy or obtain an application or game, the only place you can do this is with the App Store thru iTunes and that is it. But a developer has created a program you would like (say PodCaster for example since it's a real application), it can download podcast directly to your ipod touch or iphone which iTunes won't let you do normally cuz you have to hook it up to your comptuer to transfer PodCast, useful application right? So we just head over to the App Store... what's this... its not in App Store any more... why not? Because apple rejected the application, told the developer he wasn't allowed to have the application in the app store cuz it competed too much with iTunes. This is the trend that Apple has been doing, rejecting applications from various developers for various reasons, some for competing with apple's own product (that would be like FireFox being kicked off windows, or you couldn't install firefox on a mac cuz it competes with Safari), or for other reasons such as a feature Apple doesn't want user's to have, such as being able to skin your icons and themes and such. Well Jailbreaking removes the middle man (Apple) from this equation, once jailbroken you can use installers such as Cydia to download a applications directly from developers without having to go thru the app store, even if their application was rejected by apple. Such applications include : Winterboard : an application to change the look of your ipod, themes, skins, colors, etc etc. PodCaster: As I mentioned above. MxTube : allows you to download youtube videos onto your ipod. NES: A Nintendo emulator (you have to get the roms yourself) Various modifications and tweaks such as having 5 icons in the dock, or changing your battery graphic. As well as being able to install Apple talk so your ipod shows up like a network drive so you can utilize it's storage for files on your mac. And so on. Basically it would be like going and buying a nintendo Wii, and the only place you were allowed to buy the games was from best buy, and best buy decided what should be on the store shelf or not. Jailbreaking allows you to then instead goto game stop for your wii games if you wanted. (There are other intents for jailbreaking some not legal, but I won't get into that, jailbreaking itself is not illegal, and the applications provided in the installers are freely distributed by the developers themselves so its not stealing). PS: Sorry for the novel. For progress on jailbreaking check the iPhone Dev Team's blog, http://blog.iphone-dev.org/ PS#2 : You can still synchronize your iPod with itunes and still buy stuff from the app store without any adverse effect after jailbreaking. ------- Cut and Past End. Feel free to contact me directly if you're still confused, more than happy to help.