New "Spirit" Jailbreak Released for iPhone and iPad

This week, a new program for jailbreaking Apple devices was released.  This program has been named “Spirit.”  It’s the spiritual successor (no pun intended) to blackra1n, a program by developer George Hotz that allowed people to jailbreak their iPhones and iPods with a simple click.  Spirit follows this same one-click principle, allowing for a simple jailbreak that doesn’t involve restoring modified firmware onto the device.  Spirit has several improvements over its predecessor, the most important of them being the ability to jailbreak Apple’s new mobile product, the iPad.  Spirit is currently the only program that can do this.

Other features include the ability to jailbreak any iDevice untethered, meaning that a computer connection is not required to restart your phone after it has been turned off.  This is a major improvement over blackra1n, which failed to produce an untethered jailbreak on newer iPhone 3GS models.  The only feature blackra1n has over Spirit is a carrier unlock, which allows you to use a carrier locked iPhone on any network.  This can still be enabled by download however, so it is not a large issue.

So far, the demand for Spirit has caused some commonly used jailbreak services to crash from demand.  It is clear that more and more of the community of Apple device users wants an open platform, regardless of the consequences.