I’m often asked “Why should I jailbreak my iPhone?” or even “Tell me why I need to jailbreak my iPhone”. Frankly – I am not going to tell anyone why they should or need to do such a thing. At the end of the day, it is your phone, so the decision should be made by you. I will, however, tell you about some of the many benefits of proceeding with the iPhone jailbreak.

A brief backgrounder: if you don’t already know, “jailbreaking” is the process of removing most restrictions on your iPhone placed by Apple. If you have an iPhone, you know you can’t change the layout of your icons, choose unique tones when you get a text message, etc. When you jailbreak, all of this (and much more) becomes possible.

I am not going to cover how to jailbreak. There are plenty of sites out there that detail the process. I will say that it is extremely easy, and you can always “go back” to an un-jailbroken state by doing a restore in iTunes. I would recommend you take the clean route, which involves wiping your phone clean when jailbreaking. This is a personal preference.

Now … on to the good stuff. Here is a brief list of some of the abilities you gain when you jailbreak:

1) Customize Anything

You can change your icons, you can rename them, you can change the carrier name, replace the carrier logo, choose your own background picture, change the colors of your dial buttons, change the sounds you get when a text or email comes in, etc. You can download free themes that instantly change the entire look of the phone.

2) Background and Multitask

Let’s say you have a music app installed – something that streams music over the Internet. Great. But what if you want to listen to music while you surf the web? Once jailbroken, you can background apps (similar to minimizing a window) and they continue to run with a program called Backgrounder. So now your music app is still streaming music in the background, but now you can fire up a web browser or compose an email.

There are great add on programs that let you manage multiple apps that may be running. This makes it easy to switch between different items you have running.

3) Streamlined Access to Apps and Controls

A favorite add on for jailbroken phones is SBSettings. This adds quick access to many of your features and controls (and is customizable as well.) It takes less than 2 seconds to turn on or off 3G or wireless. No matter where you are in your iPhone, you can (almost) instantly turn on or off certain features. It is very convenient in that you don’t have to go back to your home screen, settings, etc.

4) Run Apps Apple Doesn’t Allow

One of the things I really dislike about Apple is the whole dictatorship they employ. Apple has and will probably continue to pull apps from their store for no reason. Some of these apps will move to the jailbroken equivalent app store. You can buy these apps for as little as a dollar, and many of them are free.

There are countless themes, applications, tweaks etc out there for jailbroken iPhones. Look around YouTube or just do a Google or Twitter search to find anything and everything. www.greenjellofart.com has quite a bit of information jailbreaking your iPhone. So what are you waiting for?