Yesterday I broke down and upgraded my iPhone 2G to the most recent iPhone OS 3.0. Since my iPhone was jailbroken this process wiped out all my jailbreak apps and settings. It’s been a long while since I’ve used a virginized iPhone, so my first impressions of using 3.0 was mainly all the great things I was missing. I’ve seen many people online mention about what is the benefit of actually jailbreaking would be anymore, given 3.0 was supposed to remedy many of the main benefits of jailbreaking, like data tethering and copy and paste functionality. While those issues are now moot with the new update, there are still plenty of reasons you might want to jailbreak a phone running 3.0.

SBSettings – This is a great little add-on that allows you to change settings from within any app on the iPhone. Just drag your finger from the top of the screen to the middle and it will pull down a menu with many handy options. I find I use it the most when my phone has inadvertently latched onto an open wifi network and I want to use an Edge connection. Many of these settings are buried 3 menus deep within the phones settings, so being able to change these on the fly is very handy.

5×5 icons – I find this one makes you realize how much wasted space there is on an iPhone. Being able to cram a whole other row and column of icons onto your screen is great since it means your apps now take up less pages. Once you get a few pages of apps you know how annoying this can get. The video I linked to shows you what you need to do to give your phone the ability to show up to 25 app icons on your screen compared to the usual 16.

5 row QWERTY keyboard – There are all sorts of keyboard tweaks you can do when you jailbreak, but none are as handy as having a 5 row keyboard. Not having to go to the second page and back just to put in a number or special character is quite awesome. Sure this isn’t for people with overly large fingers, but I wouldn’t say I have small fingers and I do alright with it.
Update Jul 20/09 Unfortunately we’re still waiting for this one to materialize. The holdup is that iKeyEx hasn’t been updated yet, mainly because there were apparently a bunch of changes made with regards to how the iPhone handles the keyboard layouts in 3.0

Categories – Along the same lines of fitting more in, the Categories app allows you to group your apps in folders. I have my stuff grouped into games, media apps, net apps and miscellaneous. It just generally allows you to keep on top of all the various apps you have and only keep the ones that you use on a regular basis available and cut out the rest of the clutter.

Custom backgrounds – And by background I mean pretty much anything on the screen. You can change your icons, colour of your wifi indicator, fonts, you name it, there’s a tweak for it. Default black and white for everything is no longer necessary.

Video applications – If you’re like me and have a 2G, or even the 3G iPhone Apple still hasn’t unlocked the ability to capture video on our iPhones. Given this is one of the main selling points for the new 3GS model, I can kind of understand why they wouldn’t want to suddenly open that functionality for the previous models. Well fear not, there are loads of jailbreak apps that allow you to capture video. I personally use Cycorder and Qik on my phone. Qik is great in that it automatically streams your video to qik.com and it’s instantly viewable to others. It also allows queuing of videos, so if you don’t have a data plan or wifi connection you can still capture videos and upload them later.