Since I am ruining my apple products and I'm staying home, I figured it would be a good idea to consider jail breaking my iPhone.

don't know anything about it really...recommended or not?

 

Depends on what you want to do with the phone?
i jailbroke mine coz i like to tinker with gadgets and to enable the hotspot feature which is blocked by my carrier (tho you dont really need to jailbreak for this feature)

also their are some nifty apps available from cydia which are free like sbsettings, TvOut2, open SSH etc... ( i like these apps because they add more functionality to the iPhone)

it is super easy to do, but if you are satisfied with the phone as is and have no urge to tinker then it may not be worth it.

 

Doing so makes it possible a future software update will brick the phone. It's unlikely, but possible.

I did so on my original iPhone, as at the time there weren't enough official apps to support everything I needed to do on the phone. At least for a few weeks, before I gave it away due to AT&T being complete trash.

On the 4, I haven't bothered, as there are plenty of apps to do everything I need, from Remote Desktop / VNC to SSH, etc, and Verizon works great with tethering. So, no need to mess with it.

 

I've jailbroken every iPhone I've had. Its easier than ever to do with jailbreakme.com on the updated software. Cydia is great with sbsettings and winter board to make my phone a little different. Face break let's you FaceTime people over 3G anywhere and the wifi hopspot is nice too. Definitely worth it to me and can be reversed with a restore if you need it.

 

Do It

this is the first thing i did when i got my iphones

 

As Simba said, it's possible to brick the phone when you upgrade the OS, but I think the reward outweighs the risk in this case. Jailbreaking will allow you to use the phone to it's full potential, and you can always skip updates if you don't want to risk messing up your OS.

 

What about for the iPad? Anyone have one that's jail broken?

 

I jailbroke my first 3GS to get tethering, the phone never ran "right" after the jailbreak and would get strange graphical glitches and such. Turned out I didn't really use the tethering function that much. I did come to really like the lockscreen info app that you can get through cydia, but I never jailbroke my subsequent 3GSs to get the functionality back.

There are definitely some cool things you can do with a jailbroken phone (or iPad), but I just need mine to work reliably. Hopefully iOS5 adds the functionality of lockscreen info.