Which is Firmware and OS

[elbeasto]

I have been trying to figure out which is which based on what people have said but I am not finding a concise answer. I hear Cydia called both an OS and Firmware. It obviously can't be both, so which is it?

So does anyone wanna give me a run down on what REALLY happens when we do jailbreak and unlock? I read the post about terms and jailbreak allows us to RW to the filesystem and unlock allows us to use different carriers. Im more interested in the "how" though not the "what". How does jailbreaking let us do that? and when we jail break are we still using OS X? or are we installing our own OS on it and because its our own OS we have root and can obviously give out RW. And what about the unlock. Is there a flag somewhere in the firmware that gets flipped to allow different carriers?

[lach]

Correct me if im wrong, but i believe jailbreaking allows you write access in the root partition on your iPhone. Normally, apple only allows you read permissions. Therefore, once you have jailbroken you are able to install things (such as cydia and our jailbroken apps) that apple does not approve of. As far as the really technical stuff, as to how the exact process goes, im not so sure. That may not be released from the dev-team as that is there method of the actual jailbreak!

[ajl917]

Jailbreaking opens up your phone so that you can edit the root partition and take control of your phone. Unlocking your iPhone makes your phone able to run on ANY GSM network. In the US, thats TMobile. Cydia is the installing program for jailbreaking. It makes customization a lot easier that having to add everything manually from your computer. Now you can just run that and press install. Cydia is simply a program/app though. The OS or Operating System is the iPhone and the firmware is like 3.0.1 or 3.0...