Your get out of jail card

Jailbroken, the Apple TV becomes a powerful media hub. Photo / Supplied

Once we've bought something from a shop, we can generally do what we like with it. But some technology companies become desperately unhappy about the wilful repurposing of their products, particularly if it's a smartphone. And they'll build in substantial barriers to stop us doing it.

"We're ensuring a seamless customer experience" is the kind of excuse that's given for erecting these walled gardens, as they're known, but the real reasons are generally commercial - encouraging us to make further purchases or to protect agreements with other companies. To the rescue, however, comes the jailbreak.

Millions have used software freely available online to get under the bonnet of various devices, and coax them to do things that are forbidden by the manufacturers. One common aim is to enable tethering, where your phone's 3G internet connection can be used by a computer. And in the US, huge numbers of iPhones are jailbroken in order to get them operating on a network other than AT&T (to which all new iPhones are SIM-locked). In New Zealand, iPhones were initially sold only through Vodafone, but now even Apple sells the phones unlocked and Telecom has been enticing iPhone users to their XT Network with prepaid SIM card credit.

This summer saw the US Library of Congress rule that jailbreaking isn't illegal; the status in the EU is unclear, but experts deem it unlikely that it would ever be prosecuted.

Shortly after the ruling a website called Jailbreak Me was launched, offering a trouble-free iPhone jailbreak in a single click - and suddenly you could install non Apple-approved apps that would let you use your phone as, say, a mobile hot spot, or to download YouTube videos. Marvellous, right?

Well, not entirely. The efforts of these hackers are pretty extraordinary, but they're not flawless; jailbroken devices might lose some important features, and apps that haven't gone through an official vetting process might be prone to crashing, or leave the door open to viruses. And then there's the more obvious point that it invalidates your warranty; if jailbreaking has left your device malfunctioning, not much sympathy will be coming your way. With the high cost of replacing a smartphone, even diehard geeks have questioned the value of jailbreaking.

In New Zealand jailbreaking is endemic. Why wait months for a fix when you're so far down the Apple food chain and there's a DIY solution at hand??

Then there's the new Apple TV. A snip at £99 (NZD170), it's a nice enough toy, allowing you to stream music and certain kinds of video from a computer running iTunes to your television. If only we here in New Zealand could actually get TV on Apple TV. Alas, not yet. But jailbroken, it the Apple TV suddenly becomes an incredibly powerful media hub - which it falls short of at the moment because of those aforementioned commercial considerations. Install an app like Plex (a third-party OS X and iOS all-purpose media manager) on a jailbroken Apple TV, and suddenly a library of your ripped DVDs can be available to watch in a popup menu. In addition, BBC iPlayer and 4OD stream direct to your television, along with a large selection of free content. Jailbreaking an Apple TV running the latest software is a complex procedure, and I wouldn't recommend it - not least because of the warranty issue. But there's no doubt that the unlocked potential of the cheap, cheerful Apple TV will have both hackers and consumers alike salivating slightly in 2011.

- INDEPENDENT, additional reporting Tony Murrow