So it’s been just about a month now since I “jailbroke” my iPhone 4. There are days where I think “How in the world did I ever live without it?” Then there are days where I curse jailbreaking and threaten to restore my iPhone back to factory default and leave jailbreaking behind forever.

Starting with the cursing; recently, I have been having issues with my Home button not working correctly. I’m having to “respring” the phone several times a day. It’s really weird. The button works somewhat. If I double press it, I get the multitasking/fast app switching list just fine. However, if I’m in an application, when I press the Home button, I can’t get back to the home screens.

For the longest time, I wasn’t having any problems with the Home button, so I have to assume that a recent update has caused this problem. There is a package called “Activator” that controls all the buttons as well as many gestures to do things like if you swipe the Status Bar you will activate SBSettings. I’m assuming that Activator has broken something that is causing the Home button to not work correctly. Looking at Activator’s Changelog, it states “Fix Single Press Home Button at lock screen”. It sounds like they fixed a bug somewhere, but the might have accidentally have broken the functionality of the Home button when it’s not assigned to something in that package.

Either way, it’s a problem that is really getting frustrating.

Another thing that has been happening frequently is that in application sound stops working. Now to be fair, I have been downloading packages that are supposed to adjust the sound profile so that I don’t have to keep going into settings every night to turn off certain sound settings and in the morning to re-enable the sounds later. I’m going to have to remove the packages to see if that fixes the sound issues. None of the sound profile tools really work with iOS 4.x, so I really have no need to have them installed for now.

Now for the “How in the world did I ever live without it?” part. I own a WiFi based iPad and it turns out that it’s pretty useless when I go out into the world unless there is free WiFi available. Well, there is a package called MyWi 4.0 which allows me to create a WiFi hotspot in my iPhone. It sells for $19.95 and has a 14 day free trial. It’s a WEP secured hotspot that you can configure the amount of output power to help conserve iPhone battery. MyWi will definitely eat battery power, so it’s pretty important to keep the power as low as possible. Also, secure the hotspot signal! You don’t want anyone in the immediate area to access your 3G hotspot.

I’m currently using the free 2 week demo, but I have to say that I’m very impressed with the way MyWi works.

I haven’t actually tried it out in the wild, but I enabled MyWi on my phone and selected the MyWi SSID on my iPad and low and behold, I was up and browsing with my phone as the hotspot. Then later that day, my ISP died and I lost my broadband access to the internet. Right in the middle of a City Story session. City Story requires a connection to their servers to play. So, I fired up MyWi on my iPhone and connected to it on my iPad where I play City Story from and I was then able to complete my game session. That was awesome!

Now, did I have to complete my session at that exact moment? No, not really. However, since I have MyWi, I thought I would give it a try to see if it would work and it did a great job! I was able to check email and even browse the web while my ISP was out.

Now, I have to say that using MyWi instead of paying for tethering through AT&T is probably illegal and definitely against AT&T’s terms of service, so if they catch you doing this they can drop you from their service and probably charge you for early service termination. So, if you use MyWi on your jailbroken iPhone, make sure you use it sparingly so that AT&T doesn’t suspect that you are using tethering.