New Details on iOS 4.2.1 Jailbreak and Unlock

The iPhone Dev Team has just posted a new blog post informing the status of unlock and jailbreak of the newly released iOS 4.2.1. The post starts by warning unlockers to stay away from iOS 4.2.1 until they release new tools to creat custom .IPSW firmwares that don't update your baseband.

However, jailbreak for older devices on iOS 4.2.1 shouldn’t be a problem at all as the post states:

The best news of all is for owners of iPhone3G, older iPhone3GS, and non-MC iPod touch 2G. Due to a combination of our original pwnage2 exploit, the arm7_go exploit, 24kpwn, and limera1n, your device is “just as jailbreakable as ever.” You reap the full benefit of an untethered 4.2.1 jailbreak.

For newer devices as iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 4G, iPod touch 3G and iPad will have to wait longer for untethered jailbreak

Next are the owners of all the more recent devices. The good news there is that due to geohot’s limera1n exploit, all recent devices can be jailbroken (this will be true until Apple released new hardware that fixes geohot’s limerain exploit in the bootrom). The bad news is that right now, the 4.2.1 jailbreak is *tethered* on all of these recent devices.

Here comes the good news for iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G who rely on unlock, the iPhone Dev Team has announced that the unlock is ready and will be uploaded to the repo once the new version of Redsn0w is out, this will happen something this week:

ultrasn0w unlock: After redsn0w is officially released with the new Cydia and kernel patches, we’ll be able to assess the unlock situation. It’s already looking very promising though, so expect the unlock for the 3G and 3GS to be coming this week. The i4 unlock is taking more effort though, and no further concrete info is available about that yet.

To sum up what've been said above, you'll all get a semi-tethered jailbreak probably tonight with patched Cydia and MobileSubstrate. For unlockers, only iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS users will get the unlock this week, iPhone 4 users will have to wait a bit longer. We’ll keep you posted about jailbreak and unlock for iOS 4.2.1 but hopefully, we’ll be able to tweak our iPad folders and settings soon with some exciting tweaks.