Whited00r Aims To Breathe New Life Into Old iOS Hardware

It’s a story that’s all too common these days — once you purchase and activate a shiny new iPhone (and it seems more people are doing this lately), the old one is unceremoniously shoved in a drawer never to be heard from again. Most of the time though the device is still good, and with a little help from Team Whited00r, it could be even better.

Long story short, Whited00r is a custom version of iOS 3.1.3 meant for old-school iDevices: think 2G/3G iPhones and the original iPod Touches.

Despite being based on a very old version of iOS, the team beind the project managed to pack in many of iOS 5’s flourishes and features, from app folders and video recording to multitasking and reminders. Whited00r has been kicking around for a while as a beta, but a stable release was recently pushed out for Apple anoraks to play around with.

Sounds like a pretty good deal, no? Well, there are a few caveats that old-school iPhone owners will need to put up with, like the exclusion of notifications. Also missing is direct access to Apple’s App Store, although the Whited00r team has whipped up a few workarounds for that. Users can jump into the old jailbreak standby Cydia, although the community also has a curated portal of of apps known to work under Whited00r.

Installing Whited00r doesn’t require the iDevice in question to be previously jailbroken as it’ll do all the heavy lifting in that regard, but having previous jailbreak experience makes the process even easier. All it takes to get up and running is to sideload the custom firmware while in iTunes (much easier than it sounds), and that original iPhone of yours will be off to the races.