Want to test out iOS 5 but don’t have a developer account? No worries: a new vulnerability makes it pretty trivial to upgrade to iOS 5 on any iPhone.
Be careful, though… rolling back to iOS 4 if things go south isn’t officially supported. This is for pros only, and there’s a lot that can go wrong.
Here’s how you can upgrade any iOS device to iOS 5 without a developer account, courtesy of Gizmodo. We haven’t tried it ourselves (yet) so we can’t vouch for the method, but they’ve gotten it to work… just be extra careful before you do this.
1) Find the proper iOS 5 IPSW for your iPhone n the web. We can’t link you, sorry.
2) Plug your iPhone in, then click on the “Check For Update” button with either Option (Mac) or Shift (PC) key pressed in.
3) Manually select the iOS 5 IPSW file you downloaded and update your iPhone from that.
4) Once your iPhone device is updated, you want to triple click the home button to activate Voice Over.
5) Now triple click the home button again to trigger Emergency Call.
6) Click on Emergency Call. While it’s switching, swipe with your three fingers down.
7) You’re now in Notification Center. Click on the Weather app, then click on the home button to exit to the iPhone’s spring board.
8) Congrats! Your iOS device should be fully operational.
We don’t endorse this method of playing around with the iOS 5 beta: there’s a lot of things that can go wrong, and given the amount of bugs and issues in iOS 5 beta, and the fact that it is not trivial to downgrade back to iOS 4.3.3 if something goes wrong, we recommend only the brave try this method.
If you do manage to get it to work for you, though, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.
