For those of you clamoring for an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5, you’ve now got a great compromise to hold you over — SemiTether.
As we reported, SemiTether is a new jailbreak tweak that will allow you to get closest to an iOS 5 untethered jailbreak without actually being an untethered jailbreak.
Inside, we’ll show you exactly what you need to do to take advantage of this remarkable little tool. If your iOS 5 installation is jailbroken, you don’t want to miss this!
Step 1: First, you have to jailbreak your iOS 5 device. The best way to do so is with RedSn0w. Follow our iOS 5 RedSn0w video tutorial to learn how to do this.
Step 2: Install SemiTether by following the video tutorial below:
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dffbLvAPpM[/tube]
The Cydia Source is: http://thebigboss.org/semitether
Why SemiTether is So Useful
First and foremost, check out this post to see the differences between an untethered, semitethered, and tethered jailbreak.
Since the iOS 5 jailbreak has been tethered thus far, you need to perform a tethered boot every time you reboot your jailbroken device for any reason; otherwise, the iPhone or iPod touch would infinitely reboot and show the Apple logo. This wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that a tethered boot requires you to be near your computer in order to do so. So, if you are away from your home or office, your iPhone would be completely inoperable until you got back home, or near a computer with RedSn0w.
What SemiTether does, is remove the need to perform a tether boot to reboot. Now you can freely reboot your phone, even when you are away from the computer.
It doesn’t come without a few caveats though, hence the name, SemiTether. While you can freely reboot, you can’t access your jailbreak apps or tweaks that you have installed; you can’t use Safari, or web browse, and you reportedly can’t use Mail. This is only temporary, as all of the normal functionality is restored upon doing a tethered boot.
The good news is that you can text and use SMS. You can also use all of your other stock iPhone apps. This is much better than the alternative, which didn’t allow you to do anything! Before SemiTether, you couldn’t even boot your jailbroken iOS 5 installation without being near a computer.
We hope that SemiTether will be able to tide your over until real untethered jailbreak appears for iOS 5. We think a lot of your will appreciate this middle ground of sorts until then. Won’t you?
Note: For those experiencing boot loop issues, and constant resprings, there can be many reasons why this happens. One reason is you enabled a notification center jailbreak widget, when your iPhone is booted in Semi Tether mode. To fix this, boot tethered using RedSn0w.