Jailbreaking yay or nay?

Well I just bought a 16g iPhone 4 nov 7th. I had originally owned one of the first gen iPhones when they first came out and had tried jailbreaking it, but found that it was a time consuming and confusing process that took more work that I felt the rewards warranted.

It was probably because I did it wrong or was just stupid. But jailbreaking back then seemed to be a pain with very mixed results.

But I'm sick and tired of apples restrictions and stupid policies. I wanna know how hard it is to jailbreak and what I should be on the lookout for. Is there a link to an up to date guide to jailbreaking? I have been lookin around the net trying to learn about this but I'm afraid I will make a mistake for fear of not knowing the proper terminology.

I don't wanna change carriers, I just want to free my iPhone 4 (iOS 4.2.1) from the apple and be able to customize it and use some awesome new and apps and functions that apple sought fit to deny me.

Is jailbreaking for me? And if so can you help me figure this out? I have been looking around the dev team site. And I'm afraid to do anything, because I don't wanna use something that is going to change my carrier or anything that can't be hidden should I need to restore my iphone for warranty purposes. (if that's even possible?)

If anyone could offer me a guide or a link to a guide I would greatly appreciate it. I'm sure tree has been a dummies guide made but I can't find any on google I trust are valid and up to date, or any I can understand. and I would continue to look around but have to head to work and I'm basically asking you guys to educate me and give me the info I need because I'm ignorant and busy.

Posted via iPhone

After Some more digging j have found that i can't jailbreak 4.2.1 can I?

If so is it too late for me to downgrade my iOS?

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Originally Posted by Refuge

After Some more digging j have found that i can't jailbreak 4.2.1 can I?

If so is it too late for me to downgrade my iOS?

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Yes too late to downgrade OS. Apple no longer signs restore requests for 4.1 and without a cached SHSH blob, there is no way around this.

You are incorrect, it is possible to jailbreak 4.2.1 on all devices. However most recen devices (shipped since September 2009) are limited to a tethered jailbreak at 4.2.1. This will eventually be fixed (hopefully for everybody, but maybe only for people lucky enough to backup a 4.2 beta 3 SHSH before 4.2.1 was released. )

Tethered jailbreak is no fun on an iPhone (not such a big problem on an iPod or iPad) so I would advise you to backup your 4.2.1 SHSH with TinyUmbrella and wait until an untethered jailbreak is available for the iPhone 4 running 4.2.1

Ok, so terminology lesson 101... What is SHSH? And how Do I save a specific backup of 4.1?

I hate blindly updating... Never doing it again. I didn't know apple was making it Soo hard to jailbreak these days.

Oh, my 4.2.1, ok so how do I find a backup and move it somewhere safe? (windows 7)

And sorry for this spam posting but I'm currently giving the tethered update a fox because I never let my phone die, and I currently have no crashing problems. But if with the jailbreak o find problems I'll just restore back to stock 4.2.1