If you haven’t jailbroken on iOS 5.0 or 5.0.1 its easy.

1) Plug your device into iTunes and update to 5.0.1
2) Download latest version of redsn0w 0.9.10b1 here
3) Run redsn0w to install Cydia (see video if still unsure how to do this)

If you are using a tethered or semi-tethered jailbreak already you have two options

1) Run redsn0w but uncheck “Install Cydia” or there is a Cydia tweak from the Chronic Dev Team called Corona that will update your jailbreak from tethered to untethered. I don’t recommend using these methods. For the tethered jailbreak to get out of a reboot cycle I (and many like me) had to point redsn0w to iOS 5.0 firmware even though I was running iOS 5.0.1 on my iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4. You will likely get into a reboot loop unless you do a full restore to iOS 5.0.1. Plus, I’m a big believer in doing a full restore every so often just to make your device run smoother anyway.

So there you have it. Untethered jailbreak is here for all on iOS 5 except iPad 2 and iPhone 4S who will have to wait a few more months.

A couple of things I never noticed about the iPod Touch. First the back is silver, not white or black. No big deal I just never paid attention to that. What is annoying is there is no physical mute switch above the volume buttons. Why? How hard is it to add? I certainly wish my boys could more easily mute the device when they jump in bed with me at 6 AM. As for the speed of the device, it blows the iPhone 3G away and is noticeably faster than the iPhone 3GS. They now are playing games like Zombieville 2 and Krazy Kart through bluetooth and wifi.

Like I said, it was an easy decision. So my 7 year old actually had a iPhone 3GS and my 5 the iPhone 3G. The iPhone 3G sold for exactly $100 meaning the iPod Touch cost a net of $50 if you include gift card. The iPhone 3GS upgrade to iPod Touch 4th generation was an even swap as it sold for exactly $150. OK, yes there were Ebay and Paypal fees, but that was the only cost. Sure you can’t use it as a phone but for kids aged 5-15 isn’t FaceTime email calling better anyway? The very noticeable difference in speed and and display make me wonder why I didn’t do this awhile ago.

Belated Merry Hanukkah & Happy Christmas!

This morning I headed to the Apple Store. Packed as always, I walked out with a new Macbook Air. My wife is gonna love it. Always a great experience shopping at the Apple Store.

Next to Best Buy for an extra X-Box controller and two cases for the 8GB iPod Touches I ordered online. I went back to look at the Playbook and even the display model was sold out. I’m sure I will be able to sell a used Playbook for $200 in a few months. Not getting the press that the HP Touchpad did, but it’s selling well at it’s new price. Not one case for a Macbook Air at Best Buy?? All Macbook Pro.

Thus, it will be back to Apple Store one last time today to finish things up. I finally scored the XBox 4GB with Kinect for $199 at Amazon. Missed getting the gift card but that’s life. I’m waiting a bit on the iMac as the Mac Mini is tempting me.

The kids always come first. I’m getting two 8GB iPod Touches. Don’t be silly and buy these at the Apple Store. Most major retailers will offer gift cards with purchase of an iPod touch. Apple doesn’t allow discounts so gift cards are the way retailers get around this requirement. Toys R Us, Best Buy and Target are all offering the 8GB model for $199 with a $50 gift card (it’s $40 at Target). My 5 year old has been using my iPhone 3G and 7 year old my wife’s old iPhone 3GS for over a year. The 3G is sooooo slow and not great for gaming. He can’t even connect over bluetooth to play games with his brother. I can still sell the iPhone 3G for about $100 and the iPhone 3GS for $150 on Ebay. Thus, I’m basically upgrading them to new faster devices that fit their needs better for about $50. Of course I’m not stopping there as the deal Walmart is offering on an X-Box is too good to pass up. An Xbox 360 4GB console (with a Kinect accessory) for $200 plus a $50 gift card. Yes, I know the X-Box is now a five year old game console, but I don’t see a new X-Box coming anytime soon. More importantly, the five and seven year olds won’t care as this will be there first true game console. Maybe they won’t even play with their new iPod Touches? Toys R Us is offering the same thing, but with only a $10 gift card.

For the wife it’s an easy call – a MacBook. Not sure if it will be a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, but either way I can’t and don’t expect to find any deals. Historically, Apple never offers much of a discount. This is no big deal as my wife is worth it.

Now for the important one . . . . me! Of course, while for the kids, the X-Box will also be for me. I’m confident I’ll get into Fifa 2012. My current iMac is running way too slow when I have multiple sessions of Firefox open along with iSquint and iTunes. Thus, a 27 inch iMac with 8GB of memory is in my future. Again, I don’t expect any meaningful discount, but hey, I’m worth it. I’m also likely to get an Amazon Kindle Fire, Blackberry Playbook. I expect huge discounts on both. Not sure I’ll use either for more than week, but they’ll be fun to play with and then can be sold on Ebay for pretty much what I’ll pay for them. Similar to what happened with the HP Touchpad.

I’d like to be able to order these items online, but we’ll have to wait and see. Amazon might offer deals very similar on the items I want to buy. Anyone find a better price or an online way to get these items please let me know. It should be a fun weekend! Also, the Nintendo 64 was the last game console I used a lot. Any gamers out there I could use suggestions for what are the best games for me and the boys.

Step 1 – Add this source to Cydia http://repo.insanelyi.com/
If you need guide on how to do this see this post.

Step 2 – Tap the insanelyi source you just added and install iTransmission. Just like adding app from App Store.

Step 3 – Tap and open iTransmission

Step 4 – Tap the + sign in the bottom left and choose URL. Paste the torrent URL you want to download. Wait 15 seconds and your download should start.

That’s it. A few tips. Be sure you paste in the actual torrent url. There are tons of torrent websites. I used btjunkie in the video which has almost everything. Wait about 30 seconds for the download to start. If you want to keep your iPhone from turning off and stopping the download goto Settings – General and set the Auto Lock to Never. I would turn that back to a minute or two once you are done so your iPhone can sleep when you aren’t using it to make your battery last longer. If you are going to download over 3G (I hope you have unlimited data plan) be sure you go into the Settings of iTransmission and turn on Cellular Network. The Settings tab is the one on the bottom right. You can tap the torrent file to find the location of where it downloaded (it should be var/mobile/documents/downloads). Once it’s done downloading use iFile to cut and paste it in whatever app you want to view the file. A guide to using iFile can be found here.

So there you have it. Another simple way to download and view movies and tv shows directly to your iPhone, iPad or iPod. Hope you enjoy.

Price – The cheapest wifi only iPad 2 costs $500. This is twice the price of the Nook Tablet ($249) and more than double the Kindle Fire’s price of $199. Products that far apart in price are not in competition together. However, the 4th generation 8GB iPod Touch at $199 is right in line.

Display Size – The most important feature in a Tablet for viewing video. The iPad has a 9.7 inch display that is great for surfing the web and watching movies and shows. The 7 inch display on the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet are watchable, but no where near as good. The 3.5 inch display on the iPod Touch is small, but still watchable for brief periods of time. I’ve read the iPod Touch isn’t a tablet because of the small display size. Well if it isn’t a mini tablet then what is it? Why does 7 inch make the tablet cut?

RAM -The Nook has 1 GB, while the iPad 2 and Kindle Fire have 512 MB with iPod Touch holding 256 MB. While this gives me pause, I think the speed of the device depends as much on the operating system as anything else and iOS is just better. I’ve tried the HP TouchPad and Motorola Xoom and despite better hardware specs they don’t run as smooth or as fast as the iPad. I highly suspect the same will be true of the both the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet.

Storage – The Kindle Fire has 8GB just like the $199 iPod Touch. The Nook Tablet has 16GB while an iPad comes in 16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB models.

THE BIG DIFFERENCE is the camera and App Store. While console snobs cringe, the fact is the iPod Touch is a great gaming device. There are tens of thousands of games to choose from for both the iPod Touch and iPad. Even though they are running Android, neither the Kindle Fire nor the Nook Tablet are giving you access to the Android app store. Yes, I know you can root (aka jailbreak) the Nook. Both companies want to control purchases on their device. Sure they promise all the big games like Angry Birds, but it just isn’t the same. Why would people waste time developing their apps for such a small market compared to iOS? They won’t. The Amazon and Barnes and Noble “App Stores” will be very limited with a few thousand apps at best.

Lastly, the iPad and iPod have a camera. This makes them great social networking devices. Whether for uploading quick snapshots to Facebook or video calling on Skype.

So the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet are nothing like the iPad 2. They really aren’t like an iPod either, but with the prices in line you’ll likely only be buying one this holiday season (I’m getting two or three). My advice, get the iPod Touch. It’s clearly a much better gaming device and the camera makes it a vastly superior social network device as well.

The Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire will battle it out for sure. It’s impossible to say which has a better display as both are 7 inch and boast the same resolution (1024 x 600). Neither comes with 3G, cameras or many apps. They both run the same version of Android and will allow loading of movies and TV shows. The big differences, the Nook Tablet costs $50 more, but offers 16GB of storage compared to the Kindle Fire’s 8GB. The Nook should perform better as well as it has a full GB of RAM compared to the Kindle Fire’s 512 MB. If I had to choose I’d lean for the Nook Tablet for the extra storage and RAM. It would be $50 well spent. Also, for the non tech geek, Barnes & Noble has hundreds of retail stores you can goto to see the product and get help with it.

That said, you are far better off this holiday season buying a 4th generation iPod Touch. The 8GB model is only $199 and it offers the entirety of the App Store and a camera. It is the perfect device for using social media sites and the display while small is fine for watching movies and shows. I’m sure the vast majority of people under the age of 20 agree with me. For those really into reading I would recommend getting e-ink Kindle for $79 for that specific purpose. I’m quite surprised Barnes and Noble didn’t lower the prices on the existing Nook Color ($199) and Nook Simple Touch ($99) more. I can’t see why anyone would buy a Nook Color at that price.

Sales! Look for Amazon and Barnes and Nobel to offer some great headline catching deals for Black Friday. I suspect we’ll see the Fire available for $99. A steal if you can get it. I’d buy at that price for sure. So what tech are you planning on treating yourself to this holiday season?? I’ve got quite the list this year. I’ll write more about that once the toys are in hand.

So Friday October 21, in the afternoon I made my first purchase with the new Cards app. I wanted to see the quality of the card. I took a quick snapshot of my face outside with the iPhone 4S camera and created a card in five minutes. I was really surprised there were only 21 designs to choose from. These fell into six categories (Thank You, Holiday, New Baby, Birthday, Love, and Travel). There should be at least a dozen categories and a thousand designs. People would submit them for free. Why was this hard to do? Also, there is no way to edit the text to choose a different font, color or size? That’s bad. For $2.99 to have it shipped anywhere here in the United States is a pretty good deal. I figured maybe some Halloween cards with the boys in costume would be great. Well, it would have been outstanding except there are no Halloween themes. You could change the Happy Holidays to Happy Halloween, but come on Apple how hard is this? You want to take over Hallmark’s business you need to hire some theme design people.

After you save your design, ordering is a snap. You can choose out of your contacts or if like me you don’t put addresses in your contacts then type the address manually. You enter your Apple ID to pay. It then asks for the CVV (three or four digit number on the back of your credit card) of the credit card on file. If you have a Paypal account setup with your Apple ID you are out of luck. You can’t order unless you add a credit card to your Apple ID, or Apple makes a change.

After ordering Friday afternoon, I get an email stating it would be delivered by Thursday, October 27. The only problem is that it was SHIPPING TO THE WRONG ADDRESS! Lucky for me on Wednesday, October 26 I received the following email,

” To Our Valued Apple Customer:

Thank you for your recent Cards App purchase.

Due to a system issue, you may have received a Shipment Notification email incorrectly stating your Cards App order shipped to your billing address. This issue has been corrected.

Rest assured your order will be delivered to the correct address entered in the Cards App.

Thank you for shopping with Apple.

Sincerely,

Apple Online Store Team”

It didn’t say when it would be delivered this time, but on Thursday, October 26, I thought I should try my old address since it may have gone there. I can’t wait to see how well they handle the Christmas card traffic. Geez.

One interesting feature is if your photo has GPS data, the card can show the name of the place and where the photo was taken. The postage on the envelope is Apple designed. You get a notification on your iPhone (or iPod Touch) the day your card is delivered.

One week after my Cards order it came to the correct address. I never got the notification on my iPhone. While the quality of the envelope was fine, I was shocked at the poor quality of the iPhone 4S photo. I know its only $2.99, but maybe you should just email these cards so the picture actually looks decent.

For now this app needs a major update before I would consider using it. If it doesn’t come I doubt it will exist in a year. Then again Ping still exists for some reason right??