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Should he do it?

B

Boca

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 13, 2008
288
4
Gave my 11 yr old my old 3g to use as an ipod. He wants to jailbreak it so he can use Cydia (peer pressure at school).

What's the downside of him jail breaking an old 3g that is not used as a phone only a pod?

thanks and Happy Thanksgiving to all those who recognize it.
 
A

andy9l

macrumors 68000
Aug 31, 2009
1,699
365
England, UK
Downsides? None. Risks? Plenty. Especially with an 11 year old (no offence intended, just honesty).

The iPhone's file system is completely unlocked and open. Cydia is a third party, unofficial 'application' which fiddles with and modifies the file system as is necessary for the unofficial app you (or your son) is installing.

You can, "always" restore if things do go wrong. I say that in quotation marks because not everything will be repairable - but 90% of issues caused by Cydia app/theme installs will be. I suppose Cydia is relatively safe in that sense. I doubt that your 11 year old son will be into SFTP/SSH connections (??), but if he does start messing with that, things could get messy; very quickly.

It's like walking closer to the center of a frozen lake. Eventually the 3G is going to give - but he'll have a world of fun along the way.
 
S

SDub90

macrumors 6502a
Nov 9, 2009
685
3
Long Island
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

The biggest downside I could see is that he installs something that will kill the battery life or app cracking software.

I haven't seen anything in cydia that can't be fixed with a simple restore on DFU mode.
 
JoEw

JoEw

macrumors 68000
Nov 29, 2009
1,583
1,291
well you don't have a warrenty on it anymore so i see no harm in doing so.

Any trouble he gets into you can always plug into itunes and click restore and BAM fresh iphone 3g :cool:
 
T

tempusfugit

macrumors 65816
May 21, 2009
1,112
1
Chicago
Boca said:
Gave my 11 yr old my old 3g to use as an ipod. He wants to jailbreak it so he can use Cydia (peer pressure at school).

What's the downside of him jail breaking an old 3g that is not used as a phone only a pod?

thanks and Happy Thanksgiving to all those who recognize it.
Click to expand...

If he really wants to wow his friends he should install bootlace and android 2.2 on the 3G.

He'll be the belle of the ball.
 
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