Recently I jailbroke my iPhone and installed several apps that have changed my iPhone 3G from an excellent phone to the perfect phone for my needs. I wanted to recount exactly how this happened.

First, a little background. I frequently travel from Long Island to Washington DC to spend time at the Clearspring McLean office. On this trip, I have an AC outlet pretty much most of the way. On the LIRR, I am usually able to grab the one or two random seats with a power port near them, and the Amtrak from Penn to Union Station has power at each seat. To supplement this, in case I end up with no power for a while, I have a Black & Decker portable charging brick that will bring the phone from dead to pretty close to full.

So, as you probably guessed, I use this phone without mercy on battery life for the entire trip.

PDANet

PDANet is an app that showed up ever so briefly in the official App Store but was quickly removed. (Update: It was actually NetShare that was on the App Store briefly. PDANet has been rejected so far).

No wonder – it is the easiest way to connect any device that can create an ad-hoc network. Hands down. Basically, create a peer-to-peer network on your mac or PC, have the iPhone connect to it, and run PDANet.

The good news is that you can now easily grab it from Cydia after you jailbreak your iPhone.

You can even exit the application and use the phone while it keeps the connection going. It has been absolutely rock solid – keeping the Mac-iPhone link no matter how flaky the 3G reception is. My old solution of a bluetooth connection to a Nokia N75 was nothing like this. More trouble than it was worth.

A word of warning, once you run PDANet, even if you shut off the routing function, it still keeps a zombie process alive that doesn’t use any cycles but sucks a little RAM. Run top in terminal to see it and kill it. I haven’t found it affecting performance at all if I leave it alone. (Update: They have a new release that doesn’t leave this process hanging around. Beautiful.)

Backgrounder

Backgrounder is the golden boy release of last week. Essentially it hooks into your home button and provides three levels of exit to an app.

If you push the home button, the app exits, as usual. If you hold it for a bit, you get a notice saying that if you let go now, the app will be run in the background. If you hold it for much longer, you get a force quit, like normal.

If you’re not afraid of the terminal, you can edit its prefs file to add apps that you want to run in the background all the time. With its latest release, app developers can even add hooks in their apps to run in the background through a menu option.

So what can you do with this? Well the big news is any streaming media apps (Pandora, FlyCast, LastFM…) can be placed in the background and continue to stream while you check mail, browse the web, etc. I don’t think I need to tell you how huge this is. I’ve tried it with Pandora and FlyCast, and both worked reliably. However, if you use too much memory, it seems that the OS swoops in and terminates your background app to make room. But if you keep it civil, you’ll have an excellent experience.

BeeJive IM

Speaking about excellent experiences, BeeJive IM (also released this week) is the best IM application I’ve ever used for a mobile device, hands down.

First of all, it supports Jabber – a necessity for me to talk to my Clearspring colleagues. You’d be surprised how many mobile IM apps I’ve used that have been decent but have excluded this transport.

Second, it holds a rock-solid connection. Sure the data connection may drop out once in a while, but it proxies your connection through BeeJive’s servers. When it can’t get the message through to the app (even if the app is closed) it chucks it off through email. Add Push messaging to this combo and you’ve got yourself a pretty guaranteed delivery system. It will log you off automatically if you don’t log back into the app after a configurable amount of time.

No IM connection has been this solid on a mobile device for me. The only ones that have come close are the AT&T IM apps on Windows Mobile devices. But this reliability came at a price – SMS delivery. I’m sorry, I’m not using up my SMS plan with IMs.

Now let’s take BeeJive and add Backgrounder into the mix. If you background BeeJive, you get an updated new message count on the icon, as well as sound and buzz alert to new IMs. And again, if you get disconnected, you’re safe in the knowledge you’ll get it through email.

Mobile Scrobbler

So now I’m on my iPhone, my Mac is connected, my IM is running in the background, and I’m playing some tunes local on the phone.

Scrobble for iPhone (also available through Cydia) is a simple daemon that reports your listening habits to LastFM over WiFi, 3G or EDGE. Totally works, hangs out in the background, doesn’t use much resources. Done and done.

Terminal Assist to VPN

VPN worked on iPhone out the box connecting to Clearspring’s Cisco VPN, however the local DNS never registered. Easy fix with a simple /etc/hosts entry. But this could only be done if I jailbroke and installed the terminal.

As I said – iPhone becomes exponentially more amazing if you jailbreak it, install the right apps, and take the time to find solutions to your usage problems. It just so happens that there has been a recent rash of both official and jailbroken apps that have made many more things possible with the device, and has made it an even more effective tool in my life.

Oh yeah, and I wrote and published this post on my mac, connected through PDANet on the train to DC. Just perfect.