As most of you know I purchased an iPhone back in September when Apple reduced the price by $200. After having it for only a few days I found out about the installer.app program and I was able to unlock the phone. By unlocking the phone I was able to customize the phone a lot by adding custom ringtones, themes, and sound packs. Beyond that there were a ton of third party apps that I could install free of charge, like IRC, instant messenger, SSH, and games. This really made the iPhone worth the purchase. Not that long ago Apple released the 1.1.1 firmware and that totally took all of that cool functionality out of the phone.

Instead of upgrading I just waited until there was an upgrade to the installer.app program. I would check the website a few times a week. Finally there was an update! They directed people with 1.1.1 firmware to go to jailbreakme.com on their iPhone’s browser. So not knowing if it would work I downloaded the 1.1.1 firmware and installed it. After installing of course all my customization and third party apps were gone. So I surfed over to jailbreakme.com on my iPhone’s browser. It brings you to the AppSnapp installer. It easily installs and then your phone restarts. Now you have the installer program on your phone and you can enjoy customization and third party apps. The only customization that isn’t there is custom ringtones. There are programs that will allow you to have custom ringtones, but once you sync with iTunes they get deleted. Hopefully someone will come out with a fix for this soon.

You really don’t get that many new features with the 1.1.1 firmware, there is the WiFi iTunes Music Store, Support for TV out, and a louder speakerphone. Besides that the other new features really are not anything that great. One thing that was different was the new version of Summerboard does not scroll up and down, instead you have “pages” for all of your icons as you can see from the photos below.

I’m glad that I was able to easily able to use the 1.1.1 firmware and unlock it, although I would have liked to be able to have custom ringtones. I’m sure that is a work in progress for third party app developers.