The day before leaving home for college in 2007, 17-year-old George Hotz traded his iPhone for three different iPhones and a Nissan 350Z. The school was Rochester Institute of Technology. But the phone was no ordinary iPhone.

Hotz’s iPhone was the first to be “hardware unlocked” — modified internally to allow it to connect to cellular networks other than those supported by Apple. With the modifications, consumers in the United States could choose to use T-Mobile as their wireless provider, and people in countries that didn’t sell the iPhone could finally get their hands on one.

Breaking and entering:

Jailbreaking an iPhone or iPod touch voids your warranty and unleashes programs unchecked by Apple’s strict approval process, allowing them to potentially crash and harm the entire operating system of the device. App Store apps face hard and fast limitations as to which parts of the phone they can access, but this also ensures they cannot damage anything but themselves.

Apple refuses to be responsible for damage that might have been caused by unsupported software, and has consistently blocked attempts at making jailbreaking expressly legal due to the potentially hazardous effects that malicious code could have on a cellular network.

But Hotz’s acheivment was simply the next step in a series of events leading to the iPhone becoming a far more open platform.

For more than a month prior, a small group of iPhone users were already playing with devices that ran applications — also known as apps — created by enthusiasts, not by Apple itself. And at this point, Apple was not yet providing an App Store to make this possible and still denied that they would ever allow any native non-Apple code to run on iPhones.

By using a bug in the iPhone’s software that Apple’s programmers overlooked, hackers could force the iPhone to accept and run code not specially signed by Apple. This code would then allow programs to run and access every part of the phone’s operating system.

With full access to the hardware and file system of the device, programs can modify system settings, run in the background and have all of the functionality of Apple’s built-in apps. While today’s App Store apps are able to play in the digital sandbox with Apple-approved toys, jailbroken programs run around the whole yard making up their own games.

Jailbroken iPhones potentially have the ability to stream TV or make Skype calls without having to be on a Wi-Fi network (3G Unrestrictor app), access key system settings without leaving your current app (SBSettings), entirely customize the look of your iPhone or iPod touch (WinterBoard) or even display useful information like calendars, e-mails and weather updates without ever needing to leave the lock screen (LockScreen Info, IntelliScreen or SmartScreen) and the list goes on.

However, it’s not all roses outside of Apple’s walled garden.

Things you may want to consider:

Jailbroken iPhones have gotten a bad rap for other reasons as well. Programs that bypass the copyright protection schemes built into the iPhone OS give less-savory users the opportunity to pirate apps from the App Store — download and use them as normal without paying the developer a cent.

Recently, word has spread about iPhone “worms” — programs that run malevolent code to steal contact information, stop the iPhone from functioning or perform other misdeeds and then send themselves to other iPhones. These worms, however, only affect iPhones running a program called OpenSSH on which the user has neglected to change the default password.

To top it off, jailbreaking requires continuous work and research. Every time Apple releases an update, it is the user’s responsibility to find out how to jailbreak the newest version of the software before upgrading and possibly losing their ability to ever do so. And since jailbroken content is not backed up by iTunes, it must be reinstalled every time such an update occurs. If something happens to an iPhone that Apple needs to fix, it will not be fixed unless it has not been jailbroken.

So then, is jailbreaking worth it? If you’re really interested in your iDevice, feel comfortable enough with computers to follow correct procedures and are willing to keep up with the latest developments in the online jailbreak community, it certainly provides an even greater level of functionality than Apple’s hottest gadgets already have. Personally, I’d be hard-pressed to go back to using an iPhone in its factory state.

But if having a phone that works without fail is more important to you than one with shiny toys, keep your iPhone firmly locked up. Apple has teams of employees responsible for ensuring that the iPhone is stable as a rock. A community of hackers, no matter how resourceful, is much more concerned with adding cool new features. And no matter how cool these features may be, sometimes it’s wiser to simply stick with what works.