Verizon iPhone Is Now Jailbreakable

An anonymous reader writes "The Chronic Dev Team have rolled out Greenpoison RC5_4 aka Greenpois0n RC5 b4 for both the Mac and Windows platform, which brings untethered jailbreak for the Verizon iPhone." Since 500k iPhones were sold on the first day it'll be interesting to see how Verizon throttles users.

Re:Can you hear me ....bzzz.... CARRIER LOST

[natehoy]

We'll see, the iPhone doesn't tend to pull "mobile" sites like most other phones do, it pulls the entire real site and renders it down to a smaller screen. Blackberries, for example, tend to load preview versions of images by going through BES or BIS, and this is a lot more gentle on mobile bandwidth. I use my Blackberry 83xx (EDGE) all the time, and I have yet to break an average of about 1-2 megabytes per day. Now, admittedly, I don't use a lot of streaming media (would suck over EDGE anyway), but I use Google Maps, corporate and personal email, Gmail, Facebook, and a decent amount of web browsing. And I have yet to break 40 megabytes in a whole month. My phone does not have WiFi, so every bit it gets comes through the mobile network.

Email is done via IMAP and seems to pull entire emails down, not just the first few kilobytes with a "view more" option like the Blackberry's built in email solution.

The iPhone is, in terms of data usage, a pretty inefficient phone. That's not to say it's a bad phone, in fact it looks pretty cool, but its data usage is more computer-like and less phone-like than many other smartphones. There was also some mention about it turning the radio on and off aggressively, which gave it more frequencies on the tower than it really should have had (but saved battery life). I don't know if that problem has been fixed, or even if it was just some bad rumor, but if true that would have a negative effect on any network it operated on.

Having said all that, in at least one way I agree. Verizon is limiting the iPhone to its 3G network, which does not allow simultaneous voice and data (similar to AT&T's 2G EDGE network, but with faster data). If you make a call, your data connection will be interrupted for the duration. If you send or receive SMS/MMS, your data connection will also be interrupted (though for a very short duration).

Contrast this to AT&T where you can be talking on the phone and surfing the web at the same time, something the iPhone happens to be really good at (and if my Blackberry supported it and 3G speeds, I'd probably be gobbling up a lot more monthly bandwidth than I do today, even with all the BES/BIS compression that goes on).

That means the potential impact to Verizon's network is cut nearly in half, because the VeriPhone can only do one thing at a time, whereas the ATTiPhone can do both at the same time. A single phone will have a much lower impact to a given tower on Verizon, because it can't do as much at the same time.

I still think Verizon is going to see some significant hits once the AT&T iPhone defectors start hitting them in droves. Which is great, because I'm on AT&T. The Verizon network is welcome to 'em. :)

I'm still waiting for the reports from early VeriPhone adopters. Verizon caught a LOT of flack in the 8000-series days (a few years ago) when they announced that they were locking down the GPS radios in all 8000-series Blackberries unless you bought their TeleNav service, and even then you could ONLY use the GPS for their TeleNav service and nothing else (that was a very large part of the reason I went AT&T with my 8300, because a smartphone without a GPS is like a bicycle without pedals). I hope Apple has a lot more clout and won't allow Verizon to pull that on their iPhone customers, because that would be a real shame.