Untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.0.1 coming soon

Just a few days after iOS hacker pod2g announced that he’d performed an untethered jailbreak on a device running iOS 5.0, he’s managed to jailbreak an iPhone 4 running iOS 5.0.1.

That means that if you’re planning to jailbreak you iPhone or iPod touch once the tools are released, it’s safe to update to iOS 5.0.1 now.

There are a few caveats. If you plan to carrier unlock your phone, you’ll still want to backup your SHSH blobs first. The exploit pod2g is using has also only been tested on older iOS devices. It probably won’t work on an iPhone 4S or iPad 2.

Pod2g hasn’t announced when he’ll release the tools for jailbreaking iOS 5.0.1 to the public.

Right now the only way to jailbreak a device running iOS 5.0 or newer is to perform a tethered jailbreak. That means that you need to connect your device to a computer with a USB cable and run some software on the PC to jailbreak the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. If you need to reboot your mobile device you’ll need to connect it to a computer and run the software again, otherwise most features will be inaccessible.

An untethered jailbreak removes this restriction. Once you jailbreak your device you can reboot it at any time without losing your jailbreak or the ability to use your mobile device — at least until you upgrade to iOS 5.0.2 or whatever the next version of Apple’s mobile operating system turns out to be.