Two little jailbreakers?

Wise Words: jailbreak

On my way to the Sprachen & Beruf conference in Dusseldorf this week, I spotted two little jailbreakers as I was walking through the airport. I couldn't resist snapping them.

Sitting there in their stripy pyjamas, they stood out from the crowd. The two little jailbirds looked cute, but they were concentrating hard — and oblivious of everyone around them. Their mother told me that they had just flown in from New York (they hadn't flown the coop at all). I imagine the devices had been a godsend on the long journey. The little girl had a pink device that I couldn't recognize, but the boy had an iPhone. I wondered if he was a real jailbreaker.

If you break out of jail, you're free (for a while at least). If you jailbreak an iPhone, you have more freedom of choice. The fact that the term contains the word jail, implies that what you're doing is not, however, legal.

Although there are over 50,000 applications available on the shelves of the iTunes store, for some iPhone users this is not enough. To install unofficial apps, however, users have to download software that enables them to download applications from independent stores. This is known as jailbreaking. This isn't just about unlocking a phone so that it can be used with different SIM cards. Jailbreaking is about "pimping" the phone to suit the users' personal needs and tastes.

Apple, however, doesn't see it that way. To jailbreak an iPhone, the company claims, the phone's operating system has to be modified — which implies an infringement of the company's copyright. In addition, some of the apps that only work on jailbroken iPhones cause the phones to crash, the company claims. The company is going through the courts to stop the practice.

This week, on 17 June, iPhone owners will be able to update the software on their old iPhones. The company promises that the iPhone will then run "the next generation of iPhone apps ". It wouldn't surprise me if it also disabled the jailbroken ones, too. If it does, no doubt the hackers will soon jailbreak it, too.

The new software lets users play more games, but some of them are already playing cat and mouse (or cops and robbers).