Perfect Jailbreak: Spirit Jailbreak for iPhone OS 3.1.3 and iPad

The Spirit Jailbreak was released to the world almost last night. It was an interesting time and judging by the number of times the website and Cydia went offline it was happily downloaded by many. We took the time to download the jailbreak and apply it to our iPad.

The first thing we noticed was that Cydia was completely redesigned. The new layout looks great; however it does not support landscape at all yet [although Saurik and others are working on it]. You can only use it in portrait mode as of this writing.  We were able to get our TSS SHSH uploaded to the server when we jailbroke our iPad, but as of this writing the demand has been so great that server is now offline. The load was actually preventing Cydia from working!

 

So, what did we do with our newly jailbroken iPad? Well the first thing was to change our root and mobile passwords. Normally this would be done in mobile terminal, but that app is not working on the iPad just yet. When you open Mobile Terminal it crashes right back to the desktop.  So we used Putty instead. To get this working you have a couple of dependencies you have to install. First is OpenSSH. This is what will allow you to connect to the iPad over an SSH session. I would also install SBSettings. The reason for this is so you can turn off SSH after you are finished. It does not need to stay on all the time.  A word of caution when you install SBSettings; after you reboot you will need to respring. The reason for this is that SBSettings screws up the iPad’s layout very badly [see images on the nest page]. But the quick fix is to simply respring the device and everything is back to normal. SBSettings also can show you your IP Address for quickly connecting to your iPad.

 

Next I installed the AddExchange App. While I like the ability to use POP3 and IMAP I prefer to use Exchange if I am connecting to an exchange server. I personally run one for my own mail and BSN has recently moved to one.  With AddExchange you can have multiple Exchange Active Sync accounts and get push e-mail on each. It is quite nice if you have the need.

 

Next we grabbed things like Categories, Make it Mine, Font Swap, Dock, Intelliscreen, Notifier, Lockinfo and BT Mouse.

We were disappointed to find that many of these did not work at all. Intelliscreen and Notifier simply crash back to desktop.  Lockinfo and Dock seriously hose the touchscreen responsiveness.  In fact after I installed both on the same iPad Springboard would crash quite frequently.  I had to uninstall them and then power cycle the iPad to fix the issue. When I installed Lockinfo on its own, preferences would not load so it does not work at this time either.

Font Swap also does not work just yet. Categories works, but only in portrait mode and it does not support the Pixel Double feature so you are looking at a small screen in the middle of your iPad.  Thankfully Make it Mine worked without a single snag, otherwise I would not have any good news for you.  I also managed to install Multif0wprefs and backgrounder. Both worked very well on the iPad as did BT Mouse [for use with remote desktop].  Still many other apps either did not launch or would only run in portrait mode, would not work with Pixel Double or could not be configured once installed.

 

SBSettings breaks springboard, but a quick respring gets things back
 

One item to make sure we note here, you can install Winterboard as of right now, however be very careful with themes. Most are not working at all, also after installing SBSettings, I noticed that I cannot move my icons on the iPad around unless I am in portrait mode. I mean I can move them but as soon as I touch the icon it switches to portrait orientation [the icon not the desktop] and causes some pretty big issues unless I rotate the iPad back to portrait mode.

So we have some issues on the first day after the iPad is jailbroken. But all hope is not lost; most developers are already at work fixing the issues I have listed and even Saurik mentioned that there is lots of work to be done for the iPad. It seems that although it is based off of the iPhone OS, it is a very different derivative. It does not always perform in the same manner as an iPhone or iPod touch would with respect to the code base. So grab the Spirit Jailbreak today, but be careful what you install. I would also highly recommend making a backup of your iPad before you  jailbreak it, or install something major.

 Spirit  for win   Spirit for mac