Hooray – Apple has blessed the iPhone the iOS 4.1 update today, via iTunes! That’s great news, seeing as how iOS 4.1 will endow your shiny iPhone 4 with new features, like Game Center, TV show rentals through iTunes, and support for iTunes Ping. But, before you run off to plug your iPhone into your computer and start the update process, we feel that we should warn all you jailbreak and unlock users out there – the iPhone Dev Team has posted a warning on their blog today that advises anyone with a jailbroken iPhone, or anyone running the ultrasn0w unlock utility on an iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 against updating to the new iOS 4.1 update. iOS 4.1 kills the current jailbreak and unlock exploit for the foreseeable future. Or, as the iPhone Dev Team puts it, in the ever prescient words of Admiral Ackbar, “it’s a trap.”
For most of you out there, you’ll probably want to just go ahead and upgrade to the new iOS version. With it, you get Game Center, which allows you to automatically find other players online that are willing to go toe-to-toe with you in real-time multiplayer battles of gaming supremacy. You also get access to the iTunes TV show library and start renting your favorite shows for as little as 99 cents per episode and start watching them in mere minutes. And, you can enable support for iTunes Ping and allow you to keep you up to date on what everyone in the iTunes social network has in their music library. Oh, and let’s not forget that you can start taking HDR photos and upload videos in HD to YouTube and MobileMe. These are really cool new features that mostly outweigh the benefits of jailbreaking or unlocking your iPhone 4.
But, for the select few iPhone 4 users out there that are using their jailbroken iPhone 4 to use the WiFi hotspot feature that’s built into iOS 4 without having to sign up for AT&T’s new tiered data plans, you’ll want to hold off. Or, if you’re using your glass-and-steel Apple smartphone to travel outside your home country and you need to keep it unlocked, you’ll want to avoid this update. The Dev Team says that the new update will basically kill your jailbreak and update your baseband so as to render your ultrasn0w unlock useless:
Please stay away from this 4.1 release until a safe jailbreak procedure (which also preserves ultrasn0w) is developed and released.
But, for the overwhelming majority of you out there, you’ll be better off just trusting Apple and hitting the “update” button in iTunes. Seriously, if the words “jailbreak” and “unlock” are as important to you as the words “family planning” are to Bristol Palin, we suggest you go ahead and update to iOS 4.1. If those words mean something to you, then we suggest you heed the Dev Team’s warning.
In keeping with the iPhone Dev Team’s “it’s a trap” advisory, here’s a little comic relief for your morning tech-reading:
[Via: iPhoneDevTeam]