While it might be nice to have all those 3rd-party applications on your iPhone, and not installing the updates allows you to continue to use them without waiting for a jailbreak, the biggest flaw I see to this process is missing out on the security patches that help keep your iPhone from being hacked. Some of the security flaws have been in the most innocuous components, too, such as image rendering. And, since all applications run as “root” on the iPhone, this kind of security flaw could be pretty serious. Because of that, I personally would choose to take the conservative approach and wait for the actual SDK that will be available shortly.

Last night I used the Ziphone method to jailbreak 1.1.3. the process went smoothly, took only about 5 minutes form download to jailbreak, and all functionality is there with no crashes. There really is nothing to be afraid of.

I look forward to the SDK’s arrival, but I somehow doubt that Apple will allow an iChat-like app, due to AT&T wanting those SMS revenues. I’ve realized I don’t want an iPhone without at least that functionality, which means I’ll forego the SDK until a compatible OS version is jailbroken. Which should take about 2 weeks.