10 reasons to jailbreak your iPhone or iPod touch now

Does jailbreaking your iPhone or iPod touch mean you're a subversive terrorist bent on bringing down Western civilisation? I'd expect not, unless Osama bin Laden has just received a free upgrade.

Despite the wonderful apps the SDK unleashed, its Apple-imposed limitations restrict what developers can do with it. So for example, the Last.fm Scrobbler can't actually 'scrobble' anything you play on the phone as it's not able to access the right information, while the unofficial jailbreak Scrobbler can, over Wi-Fi or 3G for that matter.

Obviously we can take no responsibility for whether or not you decide to jailbreak your iPhone or iPod touch as it will invalidate the warranty. But the jailbreak community is simply running wild with amazing extensions, tools and handy tweaks. You'll surely have your own favourites but here's our top 10:

1. Use your iPhone as a Modem

Your iPhone has an 'unlimited' data connection, it also has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi as does your laptop. Put the two together and you've got a terms and conditions breaching mobile broadband solution! iPhoneModem is such a ridiculously obvious and helpful thing it almost criminal it's not supplied as standard. (O2 do ban this specifically in iPhone contracts - beware.)

2. Get skins and themes

Why wait for Apple to charge you another £10 to add this with the next firmware update, when with WinterBoard you can have it now! With a host of incredibly complete themes already available you can customise everything from the lock screen to your Wi-Fi strength icons.

3. Sync Google Calendar

We're left incredulous that Google Calendar can't synchronise by default with the built in one. It beggars belief - especially when the email happily works with Google Mail. Thankfully NemusSync solves that problem beautifully with two way syncing at the press of a button.

4. Get Google maps offline

Sometimes the ingeniousness of people stuns us. But with OfflineMaps you can preload Google Maps that have been downloaded on your desktop using GMDL. It's not totally straightforward, but once you've done one it's easy and lets you access maps offline, though there's obviously no search.

5. Make and add ringtones

Free yourself from the tyranny of iTunes! A massive library of downloadable ringtones exist and neat little tools such as ToneFX can help you create your own and upload them easily to your iPhone, even shuffling them and enabling you to add them to text messages.

6. Read your documents

It seems insane but there's no direct PDF, text, Word or spreadsheet reader built in or available on the iPhone or iPod touch. Sure you can email PDFs to yourself, but that's not always convenient. Docs is a good stab at bridging the gap and provides a file browser to boot.

7. Get to grips with all the preferences

Everyone loves tweak tools and BossPrefs offers a host of handy extras, such as quick reboot and locks alongside the ability to hide many of the system status icons. So you can have your iPhone as busy or uncluttered as you like.

9. Easily toggle the Wi-Fi on or off

It might seem picky but we like saving seconds and that's just what WiFiToggle can do. No need to drill down though the Settings menus any longer, just tap the icon and it'll automatically enable and connect to any known wireless networks.

10. Go Open Source for media

While it's hardly perfect, we're glad to see that someone has got round to porting this Open Source media player to the iPhone. A touch on the slow side, so it'll need some work, but it's another step in the right direction to cutting out annoying and time consuming re-encoding.