True. It seems to work okay but I don't have a 4S to compare against so not sure how much worse it is if any.

No I use a proxy online. Modmyi recently posted an article about working online servers.

I am using Spire to enable Siri on my i4 and it seems to work fine. I can use it fine while it is sitting in the dock in my truck about 4 feet from my mouth with tire, engine, and heater noise going. Not sure if it works better on a 4S but there are quite a few people using Siri on jailbroken i4's without problems.

The great grandparent up there said there is no way to restore ANY iPhone since iOS5. This isn't true. Only A5's currently can not be downgraded.

I know the point stands for A5 devices though that does suck. Finding a tethered bootrom level exploit would be nice. I'm personally sticking with my iPhone 4 until a bootrom exploit is found on the next iPhone whatever it is.

Mod parent up. 99% of jailbreaks are not based on exploits in userland through safari, they are based on USB flaws, bootrom flaws, kernel flaws, etc. They can not be remotely exploited.

I haven't read into it too much but it appears that the A5 jailbreak gets in through a hole in (the local setup of) the VPN tunnel in the OS.

Same as a real computer, once your attacker has physical access you're hooped.

As I replied before you can restore as many times as you like with pre-A5 devices like the iPhone 4, even in iOS5. Just a bit of a new procedure.

Actually for any of the pre-A5 devices this is not true. They have figured out a way to save the ticket AND shsh blobs and stitch them into your firmware file so you can flash back to it any time you'd like.

A5 devices do not have any bootrom level exploits though so this is not possible. You basically have to get 5.0.1 going now before 5.1 comes out. If not you will be stuck with 5.1.

BTW A5 devices are iPad 2 and iPhone 4S

Ya if sideloading apps is the main stopper you're pretty much hooped there. You can do this with jailbroken aps (the iPhone simply uses debain apt, so you can imagine installing normal *nix things and jailbreak apps are very easy, just apt-get install) but the normal app store apps are pretty much appstore or appsync only (though appsync is close to sideloading, can install apps from itunes or from safari directly).

While you DO need to jailbreak to get the good stuff, I still think the iDevices are more geek friendly once jailbroken. The combination of apt, full bash, openssh, full gnu tools, and a massive support base really make it a pleasure to use (again, once jailbroken).

I'm curious you rooted the xoom why the opposition to jailbreaking the iphone? You're still just getting root on the device.

I'm also curious what you can do on the rooted xoom you can't do on a jailbroken idevice? I'll have to get back into Android I think. Back when the Nexus One was out I got one and I found it to be a far less capable rooted device than a Jailbroken iPhone.

No proper SSH suite (OpenSSH), no proper GNU tools (only busybox) etc etc. The excuse I got in the forums was always some BS about it being an embedded device. Once you hit 512mb of ram and 1GHz CPU's it is hardly necessary to use garbage like dropbear and busybox.

Have things improved to help make the device a full featured computer ? On the iPhone I can code compile etc whatever I want. I run samba and/or sftp for file access, I run VNC so I can work on the phone from the computer. I can plug it in via HDMI on my TV if I like to watch shows or have a bigger work surface.

I can get right into the VPN at work, full exchange support for email, and really almost anything else I want. I haven't found it very limiting at all.

Has nothing to do with pushing your machine to the limit.

Simple every day functions stutter, delay, lag, and overall are annoying due to the lower specs and lack of polish.

It may DO what you want, but you probably won't be as productive doing it or have as much fun.

If you can look past those things then a $100 android device may be the way to go. Especially since the $500-700 Android tablets suffer from similar problems just to a lesser extent.