How to Jailbreak an Apple iPad [Video]

On April 3, the Apple iPad was released in U.S. stores for purchase. The following day, iPhoneDev team, the famous iPhone OS hacking group, demonstrated an early hack for jailbreaking the tablet and sent out the message as a Twitter update. Last week, George Hotz had announced a working solution to jailbreak the iPad. Sounds like a ‘Me first’ competition. Anyhow, it’s the consumers that will be able to make the best of iPad – be it jailbroken or not.

When you “jailbreak” an Apple device, you’re sort of freeing up the device to be used in all sorts of different ways that Apple never intended, or didn’t want to allow – it’s unlocking it from Apple’s strict proprietary software so you can install software that may not be approved by Apple… and for the iPad, this could mean turning it more into the traditional tablet computer we were all hoping for when rumors started circulating that Apple was working on one.

Jailbreak basically installs an open-source package (read: applications) manager called Cydia or others. Just like the App Store, this package manager offers apps (both paid and free) which are not available in the Apple App Store.

MuscleNerd, a member of iPhone Dev team, mentioned about the technique using which he got root access to the iPad. The iPhone Dev team is calling this jailbreak – Spirit which has been credited to Comex who mentioned that the ‘Spirit’ jailbreak isn’t based on a browser hack. The iPhone Dev Team might be working with Comex to come out with an easy-to-use tool for jailbreaking the iPad. We don’t know about unlocking the Wi-Fi+3G versions of iPad since they aren’t out yet.

Meanwhile, Hotz is still waiting for the iPad and we may expect him to show off his jailbreak skills with the iPad once he gets the device. Obviously, neither the iPhone Dev team nor Comex will reveal any details about the hack they discovered as Apple is most likely to plug the hole.

For now, it’s just a huge step in making it easy for you and me to jailbreak our iPads, but more work will need to be done before us mere mortals can install something and then jailbreak the iPad with a few clicks and use it as God intended. Once again, the long wait for the easiest solution to jailbreak the iPad begins.