TETHERING!!! SWEET!!!!! (screw you att) I might just jail brake my iPhone after all... I haven't done that since my first one... so I could get apps before there was an app store.

Don't you just love the open source movement of geeks with nothing better to do then circumvent protection enabling code!!!

Tethering is cool if you have an iPhone plan. But I want the opposite. I want to tether my iPhone to my regular phone via bluetooth to get on the internet when WIFI isn't available to me.

Someone figure that out please.

Besides the obvious downsides of jailbreaking, what else is different on your phone once it's complete? Can you still use visual voicemail and use/purchase official apps on it? Thanks.

I use visual voicemail and official apps after jailbreaking. I really, really, really, wanted to use a program named "Orbit" on my iPhone, and it was only available to jailbroken phones, that allows you to "expose" your screens on your phone.

Now that I'm here, I use several programs all the time.

Like Music Control, which lets me use Pandora in the background, and you can use the "normal" Apple Skip/Pause GUI to control it from your headphones or the double-tap screen just as if you were using the official Apple iPod program. Really nice. I wish Apple would allow other people to plug into this feature.

I also use "QuickReply" all the time. It allows you to simply double tap a text message pop-up and reply from your current application (It sends the same command that receiving a call would give, so it pauses your games, but you can go right back to the game after you send the text without exiting.)

Adding a scrollbar, while basically sacrilege, allows me to read a few of my favorite websites without my carpal tunnel acting up every time I need to refresh.

Oh, and there's a real spellcheck extension, which will underline your misspelled words and offer suggestions, but that's a bit iffier in the quality department when using Safari, as text boxes like this one don't always seem to correct properly.

Everything else I use is just kinda fun hacks that just make the phone "feel" better. Like having the weather icon do a live update every fifteen minutes so that it's accurate rather than always showing it as 70 and sunny, making the clock on the springboard accurate, and adding missed calls, voicemails and e-mails to my status bar.

The disadvantage is really just that the jailbroken applications that run like haxies may interfere with certain functionality, and if you don't know what you're doing, they can really slow down your phone (Just like Apple warned us). Other than that, there isn't too much of a downside. If you're a reasonably advanced user of OS X, the iPhone will be very familiar once you jailbreak it.

The key thing when jailbreaking is, you better know what you're getting yourself into, and realize that Apple's next upgrade will probably break everything, so you can't always use the latest and greatest if you want to continue on the jailbreak.

You don't need a scrollbar to scroll to the top. You can just tap the top of the screen and it jumps to the top right away.

There are many benefits to jailbreaking. But the downsides are that your phone will crash a lot more, it will run slower (esp if you have the 3G), will have worse battery life and you are circumventing all the security measures of the phone, so you are completely exposed to viruses, exploits etc.

Find a quick way to scroll to bottom on slashdot though. You can't.

And no, just jailbreaking the phone does not do any of the things you describe. Jailbreaking, in it's most simple form, just means that you'll have read-write access to the root level of the iPhone File system. Now, am I going to try and say that some of the add-ons may cause your phone to crash more? Of course not, and if you run apps in the background, will your phone run slower? Of course it will, but those are not a side effect of jailbreaking. They're a side effect of users installing retarded apps without a clue of what they're doing.

As I was saying earlier, learn the system before you jailbreak, or be prepared for the consequences.