Getting the Most Out of Your Cydia and Icy Installs

Getting the Most Out of Your Cydia and Icy Installs
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Moving on Up

So you’ve installed Cydia, what do you do next? Load up on apps? Theme up your install? Whatever you decide, let us walk you through it…in style:

Theme Up Your Install!

One of the best things to do having installed your new jailbreak is to apply a theme to your installation. By theme, I’m referring to the bevy of options you have that make your iPhone look like practically anything. In the premium section (read: paid) of the jailbreak app stores, there are themes that make your phone look like other phones even, like Android phones or even the cool-looking HD2 interface.

The cooler themes come at a small premium ($2 usually), but even the ones that are free can still add several cool features to your phone, including the Android-like lockscreen (See our Best Jailbreak Apps of 2010 feature). You could do any number of things to the lockscreen, but the real fun begins when you start to skin your iPhone’s traditionally black background on the navigation screens with backgrounds. The possibilities are nearly endless.

Themes can also be applied to your clock, your battery, your AT&T logo, etc. If there is an aspect of the phone you wish you could change all you have to do is install Winterboard and look around the Cydia repositories for the particular thing you want to change about your iPhone. Personally, the Intelliscreen add-on is particularly cool for getting more out of your phone, and an app like Backgrounder can add to your iPhone’s non-existent multi-tasking capabilities (at a small hit to processing power).

Load Up on Apps

Got the Themes installed? Time to hit the scene again looking for the latest and greatest apps to install. The first app you should install? The 3G Unrestrictor. The app costs about $2-$3 and will open up a world of possibilities for you, allowing you to download podcasts, music, movies, and the like all on-the-go even if they are over 10 Mb in size. This means that you no longer need a Wi-Fi source to access things like Skype. But we’ll talk about that app more in our Best of 2010 feature for Paid apps.

The main things you need to load up on already are well-known in the jailbreak community, especially apps like Categories, and several others that allow you to do literally anything you want to the user interface. Want five apps or more in a single lane of your navigation screens? There’s an app for that. Want to be able to blacklist calls? There’s an app for that. Want to OpenSSH files onto your iPhone? There’s an app for that. The main issue most people have after jailbreaking is lacking the patience to get a truly rewarding experience out of the whole thing. Don’t be afraid to install and later uninstall the apps that don’t work for you. After all, as long as things are free (or a trial), there really shouldn’t be much of a problem. If you just lay back and enjoy the ride, you’re much more likely to find new and exciting features for your phone than you never ever thought possible.