The world of iPhone and iPod touch jailbreaking & unlocking has been fairly quiet as of late, but the collective known only as the iPhone Dev Team has just taken its latest tools out of beta in the form of redsn0w 0.9.2.

redsn0w 0.9.2 is mostly noteworthy for iPhone or iPod touch hackers who want to jailbreak their iPhone OS 3.0 or 3.1.2 device with custom boot or recovery logos (to replace the stock Apple logo with something of your own choosing, for example), without having to go to the lengthy process of restoring their device from a custom firmware created with the group’s PwnageTool and then syncing all of their media & applications back to the device.

The iPhone Dev Team weren’t the first to unlock iPhone OS 3.1.2: Original iPhone hacker “Geohot” returned to the scene three months ago with his “Blackra1n” one-click solution for Mac or Windows, although newer devices require a “tethered reboot” to work, meaning you have to connect your device to a computer in order to complete the boot after a reset. redsn0w 0.9.2 has the same requirement, and those same newer devices (particularly ones that come out of the box with iPhone OS 3.1.2) aren’t capable of using custom logos.

If you’ve already got a jailbroken device -- regardless of how it was originally done -- redsn0w 0.9.2 will allow you to change your boot logos, revert back to the stock Apple logos or even switch verbose booting on or off, all without having to do a messy (and time-consuming) restore in iTunes.

The jailbreaking saga has been a rollercoaster ride over the last two and a half years, with the hackers gaining ground on Apple, only to be forced to go back to the drawing board with each new major release of iPhone OS. Common theory holds that iPhone OS 4.0 will hit the streets by June (along with a new iPhone), so the cat & mouse game (as Apple CEO Steve Jobs called it) will surely continue, and probably expand to include the iPad, when it hits stores in late March.

Until then, the more adventurous among us can head over to the redsn0w website and download the 0.9.2 software for Intel-based Macs running OS X, or Windows.

(Image courtesy of TouchMyApps.com)