iPhone Dev Team

Good news for those who may have been running into issues trying to jailbreak an iOS device with Absinthe 2.0. The iPhone Dev-Team has officially updated all of their jailbreak tools with the iOS 5.1.1 untethered jailbreak. The official announcement details all of the specifics, but the main tools highlighted are PwnageTool 5.1.1 and redsn0w 0.9.12b1.

Other tools that are now updated include cinject 0.5.4 (still rocky-racoon but with added updates) and ultrasn0w 1.2.7 (this includes no new baseband support, but it does make ultrasn0w iOS 5.1.1 compatible). Dev-Team states that if you've already installed rocky-racoon, there's no reason to reinstall unless you're having problems.

The Dev Team has released redSn0w version 0.9.10b8b which brings only a minor bug fix. According to the Dev Team blog, the "0.9.10b8b update to redsn0w makes the zip files more compatible with the native Windows explorer (which doesn’t like leading slashes in the filenames)." The previous version released a few weeks ago helped users take advantage of the popular SAM unlock method.

In the meantime, the jailbreak community is closer to releasing an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.1. Currently only A4 and A5 devices on iOS 5.0.1 and lower are jailbreakable. A4 devices can upgrade to iOS 5.1 but they will have to go tethered. Hopefully there is an untethered solution for all iOS devices right around the corner.

It may only be the first step, but iPhone developer MuscleNerd has successfully jailbroken the iPhone 4S. According to his post on Twitter, there are "huge missing pieces" with much work to be done before a public release can be contemplated. Still, we can see in the screenshots below that MuscleNerd has jailbroken an iPhone 4S running iOS 5. On the left is console root access on the device.

The right screenshot shows Cydia and Siri running on the iPhone 4S with iOS 5. For those waiting for a jailbreak solution for the iPhone 4S, this is encouraging news and it's only a matter of time until the iPhone Dev-Team or someone else gets everything together for a major iPhone 4S jailbreak release.

Developers are moving closer to an untethered iOS 5 jailbreak every day. Thanks to BigBoss, now you can protect your tethered iOS 5 jailbreak from making your iPhone unusable during a crash or unplanned reboot. The solution to the problem, known as a semi-tethered jailbreak makes it possible for the iPhone to come back up when you can't be near your computer for a full tethered boot.

There are some quirks to the SemiTether package, but having an iPhone that will start up is much better than one that just stays on the Apple logo. You'll still have to get back to your computer eventually to boot tethered for access to jailbreak apps and Cydia. Safari and Mail will also not be functioning when the iPhone is in a semi-tethered state.

Thanks to iPhone Dev-Team the redsn0w jailbreak tool is updated to jailbreak the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS running iOS 5. This is a work in progress designed to help app developers update their products for the latest firmware. As such, Dev-Team considers redsn0w a beta release and warns early adopters there may be lingering bugs in the firmware.

Before you go ahead and read the tutorial, be aware this does not apply to the iPhone 4S or iPad 2. Jailbreak solutions for these two devices are under development and have not been released. When it comes to the iPhone 4 and 3GS, most devices will require a tethered jailbreak.