To jailbreak or not to jailbreak?

Having just received a brand new iPhone (to replace my original after the touchscreen stopped working) I have been loathe to do anything nasty to it. It still has that new iPhone smell. The buttons are still crispy and sharp. It doesn't have any of the distinct "character" marks on the corners from various (ahem!) interactions with pavement.

Heck, it was tough to stick my privacy screen protector onto it.

After seeing the light of third party applications I was tempted to jailbreak my new iPhone on day one but I resisted. It's supposed to be a phone, I keep telling myself, let it just be a phone. My decision not to jailbreak was recently validated by a fellow iPhoner who claims that after a good "nuke and pave" of his jailbroken iPhone to a clean 1.1.2 state that it gets better reception.

Then there's the fact that my new iPhone came with firmware 1.1.2 pre-installed which closes the easy-to-hack TIFF exploit making it somewhat harder to jailbreak. To jailbreak a 1.1.2 iPhone, you have to revert back to firmware 1.1.1 and it didn't seem like a trivial task after a little Googling.

Then came the Lifehacker piece on how to jailbreak the the new iPhone or iPod touch you got for Christmas. Damn them.

In it, author Adam Pash explains how to downgrade to 1.1.1, jailbreak and even patch it back up to 1.1.2 so that you can have neat features like double-space periods and double-tap-home iPod controls.

It all seems so tempting, but I think that I'm going to wait it out–for now. After all isn't uncle Steve going to drop some new iPhone goodness on us at Macworld Expo in a couple of weeks?

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