This weekend the iPhone Dev Team and Chronic Dev Team released tools to jailbreak the iPhone 4s and iPad 2 running iOS 5.0.1. And it turns out an awful lot of people were waiting to do just that.

Just three days after the jailbreak utilities were first released, the iPhone Dev Team reports that nearly half a million iPhone 4S devices have been jailbroken. The iPad 2 numbers are a little funkier, with about 300,000 new iPad 2 jailbreaks and around 150,000 people who had jailbroken their iPads while running iOS 4.x now upgrading to iOS 5.0.1 and jailbreaking again.

The stats are compiled from the number of new devices pinging the server for the Cydia store for jailbroken devices. Cydia is installed when you jailbreak your iDevice.

In addition to enabling support for apps that aren’t available from the App Store, jailbreaking allows you to access hidden files and settings on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad and make changes to the look and feel of the operating system.

Up until recently it was easy to jailbreak an iPad 1, iPhone 4, or earlier devices including all iPod touch models. But the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 both have new hardware that had proven more difficult to crack… until now.

Chronic Dev Team has released a utility that can jailbreak the iPad 2 or iPhone 4S. It’s the first jailbreak utility available for devices with Apple’s dual-core A5 processor. Up until now all jailbreaking tools only worked on phones or tablets with the A4 processor or earlier chips.

The new tool is called GreenPois0n Absinthe and you can download it from the GreenPois0n website. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The iPhone Dev Team also has also released a command line-based jailbreaking tool soon which walks you through the process one step at a time. It works on Mac or Windows.

This should help identify any remaining problem spots. Eventually the latest jailbreak tools will be incorporated in the next version of the popular redsn0w utility for jailbreaking iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad models.

Jailbreaking an iOS device allows users to install apps that aren’t available in the App Store including software which can change the boot logo, notification system, multitasking tray, or make other system-level changes to the operating system. It will also probably void your warranty.

Absinthe performs an “untethered” jailbreak, which means you can reboot your phone or tablet without having to connect it to a computer via a USB cable.

Apple and Google may have kicked the official Grooveshark apps out of their respective app stores, but Grooveshark has found another way onto your mobile device. The company has launched an HTML5 app which runs in a web browser but which feels a lot like a native app.

All you have to do is visit html5.grooveshark.com in nearly any web browser (desktop or mobile) to access a new version of the web-based streaming music service optimized for mobile devices.

Grooveshark’s HTML5 app is free to use while in beta, but it doesn’t have all the features you might expect. There’s no opportunity to login with your username and password to access playlists or favorite tracks, for instance

The reason Apple and Google booted the Grooveshark is because it’s not at all clear that the service acquires its music in a legal fashion. Grooveshark has a sort of post music first, acquire the streaming rights later approach and the company has been sued by pretty much every major music label.

While Grooveshark’s future remains unclear, the present is also a little funky. Because the company’s music catalog comes from user subscriptions, Grooveshark often has multiple listings for the same song while many songs that you might expect to find are simply not available. For instance, it’s no uncommon to find just 3 or 4 tracks from an album that has 10 or 12 songs.

Grooveshark’s desktop browser-based service is typically free, but the company charges to use its mobile apps. For the complete experience you can still download the mobile apps — but iOS users will need to have jailbroken devices and Android users will need to be able to install apps from unkown sources, since the app isn’t available from the Android Market

Developer Android Neal has been working on a new default music player for CyanogenMod 9. While CM9 isn’t ready for public consumption yet, the music player is ready to go and you can download and install it on any device running Android 4.0 or up. That includes devices running alpha or beta versions of CM9.

CyanogenMod is a custom version of Android based on the the open source code available for Google’s operating system.

The new music player adds a number of options that you won’t get from the music player Google ships with Android, including:

• Support for themes
• Gesture support
• Motion-based controls
• Search the Android Market for a currently playing song
• Share track info with social networks
• Set songs as ring tones
• Control music playback from the lock screen

While the app currently requires Android 4.0 and up to run, Neal plans to develop a version that will run on earlier versions of Android as well, although it may lose some of the features such as lock screen controls and notification controls.

TiVo has finally released an official Android app which you can use as a remote control for your TiVo digital video recorder. In fact, the remote control function actually looks like a TiVo remote. But that’s just one of the things you can do with the free app.

You can also browse a 14-day program guide, schedule and manage recordings, view cast and crew information, and comment about shows on Facebook or Twitter.

The app also lets you search for on-demand content from Netflix, Amazon Instant Video or Blockbuster.

While the TiVo app is optimized for smartphones and tablets with 7 inch displays, it should run on any device with Android 2.1 or newer.

The new app looks an awful lot like the TiVo app for iOS which was released in July, 2012.

via Zatz Not Funny

The developers behind the popular CyanogenMod version of Google Android have been including a custom version of the ADW Launcher app with their software for the past few years. But CyanogenMod 9 will be the first version of the team’s software to include a new launcher called Trebuchet.

An early version is now available for download. You can install it on any phone or tablet running Android 4.0.3 and up, but you’ll need to have root access since the app needs to be installed in the /system partition of your device.

An Android launcher is the software that powers the home screen and list of applications. Trebuchet is based on the default launcher included with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but the CyanogenMod team is tweaking the launcher to offer a number of optimizations, including:

• You can set a custom number of home screens.
• Users can enable or disable the search bar at the top of the home screen.
• Automatic screen rotation can be enabled or disabled.
• You can sort apps in the app drawer by name or install date.
• Any widget can be resized.

Upcoming features will include a dock, transition effects, and the ability to backup and restore your settings.

While the app launcher will be included in future versions of CyanogenMod, anyone with a rooted Android 4.0.3 device can install it now using the download links from the xda-developers forum.

Hackers have been jailbreaking iOS 5 devices since Apple’s latest mobile operating system was still in beta. But up until now the only way to jailbreak an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad running iOS 5.0 and up was to perform a tethered jailbreak. That means that you needed to connect your mobile device to a computer and run the jailbreak software again any time you reboot.

Jailbreaking allows iOS users to access files and settings that would not otherwise be available, install apps that aren’t available in the App Store, unlock iPhones for use on alternate cellular networks, and make other changes.

Now a hacker named pod2g has released the tools to perform an untethered jailbreak, and the folks at the iPhone Dev Team and Chronic Dev Team have packed them up into some easy-to-use utilities.

This means that it’s easy for almost anyone to perform an untethered jailbreak on iOS 5.0.1 so that you can reboot your mobile device without losing any functionality.

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LogeMeIn‘s mobile apps for iOS and Android let you login to a remote computer to run applications, access files, and perform other functions that can make your smartphone or tablet feel like a full-fledged computer. But at $30, LogMeIn is kind of expensive for a mobile app.

Now the company has released a free version of its iOS app that offers basic remote desktop functionality.

You can use the free app to login to a Mac or PC using the free app to run programs. For instance you can view documents stored on your PC or surf the web in a full version of Firefox or Internet Explorer from your mobile device.

What you can’t do is stream video, transfer photos or other files from your remote PC to your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, or use the remote printing function.

For those features you can pay for an in-app subscription update to LogMeIn Pro which costs $40 per year. Or you can make a one-time payment of $100 for the LogMeIn Ignition app.

This new freemium model is similar to the way LogMeIn’s web-based service works. You can install the LogMeIn client on any desktop computer you want to remote control for free and login from any supported web browser for free. But if you want advanced capabilities you need to pay.

via Lifehacker