A few weeks ago, I decided to jailbreak my iPhone 4. Mind you, this is a practice that I had abandoned almost 2 years ago when at the time I had an iPhone 3G. So why did I now decide that I wanted to jailbreak again? One reason: I wanted LockInfo, which gives me widgets right on my lock screen, such as weather, calendar, mail, to-do, and more importantly, notifications.

Now, listen, I love iOS as much or more than anyone else. I think it is an awesome platform and one that continues to evolve and get better as time goes on. However, there’s one area that Apple definitely needs to improve: the notifications. They are just awful and intrusive and Apple needs to address this in the next iteration of the software: iOS 5.0

LockInfo, paired with another jailbreak-only utility called Pop-Up Blocker, allowed me to bypass the annoying notification pop-ups that interrupt and pause my videos or get in the way of my Angry Birds playing session. Damn you iOS! Why must you get in the way of my pig-killing onslaught? Okay, okay, seriously, we all know those notification pop-ups are annoying so you get the idea.

I lived happily with these utilities for about a month until I started realizing why I don’t ever stick to a jailbroken iPhone. It is great in some ways to taste the freedom that jailbraking gives you but there’s always a downside, for me at least, and that is the performance degradation of the phone, if ever so slightly. Truth is, with the iPhone 4 this is not as bad since it has a much faster processor and more RAM than my old 3G did, however, I still could notice some UI lag at times and a slight hit on my battery life as well as occasional app crashes that didn’t happen before when my iPhone was in stock form.

For some people this may not be a problem and it’s a small price to pay for the freedom you get but for me it is a bit annoying and a compromise that I don’t seem to be willing to put up with. Therefore, Friday night I decided that I was going to restore my iPhone back to its original state. I missed the fluidity of the device that had been slightly compromised. I wanted to get my iPhone back to a pristine state so I decided not to restore from backup and instead restore as new phone. I had to spend a few hours syncing all apps, music, etc., but it was totally worth it. My iPhone 4 is as fast and snappy as it was when I first turned it on for the first time in June of 2010.

Now, let me get back to playing Angry Birds and cursing each time one of those pop-ups get in my way!

Yes, that’s a HUGE number of downloads. Apple just announced that they have reached the 2 billion download mark from the AppStore. That is in less than 2 years!

No doubt a huge testament of the big success that the AppStore has been for Apple and it continues strong with no signs of slowing down.

Congrats Apple!

Yesterday, BGR reported on inside info about an upcoming update to iTunes which would include support for Blu-Ray and virtual iPhone apps management. Here is a concept video by svdomer09 of how the latter would possibly work and all I have to say is that if true, this would be awesome!

Push notifications are live and well on the iPhone, though the number of apps taking advantage of the feature at the moment is not very large. I have only 3 apps installed on my iPhone that have push notifications: AIM, AP News, Umbrella.

It’s been two days since Phil Schiller and company got on stage at WWDC 2009 in San Francisco. Now that I’ve had time to watch the video of the keynote and read dozens of posts and comments about the announcements as well as the myriad of Twitter updates, I’ve decided to write my thoughts.

First of all, looking at the keynote as a whole, I think it was a let down. It’d be hard to argue that we all expected more. Yes, there was a new iPhone announced – the iPhone 3G S – although the “new” can be argued. It’s still the same design, only thing that changes is the phone’s guts.

The highlights:

• OS X Snow Leopard – I was impressed with the presentation and the improvements announced at the conference. No doubt in my mind OS X will continue to add market-share even more now. Lighter version, takes much less disk space to install, installs faster. Exchange support implementation promises to be nothing short of amazing. Add to that a $29 upgrade price and it gets better.

• 13″ MacBook Pro – This is simply a winner in my book. It starts at $1199 for a MacBook Pro!

• $99 price for iPhone 3G – Okay, in my opinion, this was a great move for Apple. Bad economy and money is tight for everyone, so it makes sense. So far they have sold more than 40 million iPhones worldwide and this price will translate into even more iPhone users out there. This to me was the most important highlight of the event.

The let-downs:

• iPhone 3G will not gain video-recording capabilities nor voice control capabilities with iPhone 3.0 software update. Yes, I have video recording on my iPhone 3G via the jailbreak hack but it would be nice to have it with the native Apple firmware. There are apps in the jailbreak world that enable voice control but is not as intuiteve because the app is not available from any running application, as the Apple implementation will work.

• MMS capabilities will not be enabled for AT&T users right off the bat! Come on AT&T – this is inexcusable and pretty lame! Allegedly, it will be available “later in the summer”, which means who knows when.

As we all know by now, iPhone OS 3.0 will be released to iPhone/iPod Touch owners on June 17. Free for iPhone users but iPod Touch owners will have to shell out $9.95 for 3.0 goodness.

Many of my friends have been wondering if I will sprint to upgrade to the 3G S on June 19 and at this time my decision is no. I am content with the iPhone 3G, and since I’m not eligible for an upgrade at this time, would have to shell out more money than the $199 advertised price. In the meantime, I will go without the better camera and the compass and the native video-recording capabilities and the voice control.

Now, I anxiously await a jailbreak version for 3.0 and life will be good!