If you’ve tired of iOS’ standard blue and gray color scheme, then Color Profiles is the jailbreak tweak for you. Built by noted jailbreaker Ryan Petrich, the jailbreak tweak allows users of Apple’s mobile operating system to customize the color scheme of their iOS device.

“Color Profiles comes bundled with 19 different custom color themes that let you to radically change the look of your iPhone’s color palette and temperature,” writes Jeff Benjamin in an article posted Sunday at iDownloadBlog. “Petrich bundled quite a few custom profiles along with Color Profiles, but he also promises that we’ll see more profiles available for download from Cydia as add-ons.”

Carrying a price tag of $1.99, Color Profiles is one of the more expensive jailbreak tweaks on the market today. However, it’s certainly worth a try if you want to make your iOS experience a truly unique one. Color Profiles can currently be downloaded through the Cydia jailbreak store’s BigBoss repository.

“If you’re interested in making your iPhone look like an old school Mac, Windows machine, or something else altogether, then head over to Cydia’s BigBoss repo,” Benjamin says in his article, which also includes a video walkthrough of Color Profiles.

In yet another futuristic innovation, Apple is now offering Apple Store customers a self-checkout option for purchases of accessories and other shelf items. Yes, if you have an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, you can forgo the entire checkout process with the Apple Store iOS application.

“Apple is planning to launch an update to its retail store iOS app that will allow consumers to utilize self-checkout for purchases of accessories and other shelf-stocked items at the company’s retail stores. According to our source, self-checkout purchases will be charged via theApple Store app to the customer’s iTunes Store account,” reports Eric Slivka for MacRumors.

With the updated Apple Store app, customers can also pre-purchase iPhones and other iDevices and pick them up at the nearest Apple Store by simply showing their receipt to an employee.

“The update to the Apple Store app enabling self-checkout is scheduled to arrive on November 3rd,” the writer continues. “Apple will continue to expand its program allowing customers to have their orders from the online Apple store shipped to their local Apple retail stores for pickup. That program launched at the company’s three San Francisco stores last Wednesday and is now available at all sixteen stores in the Bay Area with further expansion apparently coming soon.”

Intelliborn has finally released its much-anticipated IntelliScreenX jailbreak package, and just as expected, the flashy tweak is one of the sleekest jailbreak downloads available. IntelliScreenX adds a multitude of widgets to iOS 5’s Notification Center, making it the place to be inside Apple’s new mobile operating system.

“iOS 5 users now have another reason to jailbreak their iOS device,” writes Joe White for AppAdvice. “Among the features added is an SBSettings style widget, a Twitter timeline (you can even tweet from IntelliScreenX) and an RSS feed (which is compatible with Google Reader and uses the Safari Reader interface). You can also add a Mail and Facebook page to the tweak, too.”

IntelliScreenX was first announced a couple of weeks ago and is still technically in the beta phase, meaning there might be a few bugs in the currently-available version. It costs $9.99 in the Cydia jailbreak store, although a free trial is also available. It hasn’t yet been announced when the final model will be rolled out.

“The Intelliborn team is continually updating the app, fixing any issues that users report,” White continues. “In short, IntelliScreenX looks like one of the best jailbreak tweaks currently available in the Cydia Store.”

The iPhone 4S battery drain problem perplexed Apple for a while, although it’s now known that constant time zone checks by the smartphone’s internal clock are likely to blame for the 4S’ low battery life. A recent International Business Times report details what users can do if they want to get even more life out of their battery, now that the draining mystery has been figured out.

“Constantly seeking the iPhone 4S’s location is a huge drain on the smartphone’s battery, because the software performing that function uses a combination of technologies — Wi-Fi, mobile mass data (which compares the strength of signals from the three nearest phone masts and then triangulates them), and GPS sensor input — to determine the user’s correct time zone,” the Sunday article reads.

The article suggests turning off “Setting Time Zone” in the Location Services tab of Settings, switching off Wi-Fi, disabling Location Services, taking your phone off vibrate mode, setting the brightness level at medium or low, turning notifications off, turning off iCloud, swtiching Diagnostics and Usage Reports off, disabling Bluetooth and restoring your phone.

“Apple has not made any official comment on the iPhone 4S battery problems,” the piece continues. “Hopefully, these tips will help stop batteries from draining so rapidly as Apple works to solve problem with the bugs in its new mobile OS.”

A beta update has been released for BigBoss’ SemiTether iOS 5 jailbreak, fixing some minor issues in the exploit, which allows jailbreakers to reboot their iOS 5 device and its jailbreak successfully without plugging it into a computer.

“Last weekend, BigBoss had released a new package on Cydia called SemiTether, which allowed users to reboot their tethered jailbroken iOS 5 device device without the need to connect it to the computer,” a Sunday iPhone Hacks article reads. “However, BigBoss’s solution had some limitations and number of users reported issues after using it. BigBoss has released a new version of SemiTether (v0.91), which incorporates the new mobile substrate by Jay Freeman a.k.a saurik that should make the semi tethered mode more stable.”

SemiTether is certainly a step up from tethered jailbreaks, which require that users hook their device up to a computer every time it’s rebooted in order for the exploit to work, but not quite as desirable as an untethered jailbreak, which makes performing such an action unnecessary.

An untethered iOS 5 jailbreak is currently being built by the iPhone Dev-Team, but SemiTether is the best option iOS 5 users have for now. It’s unclear when the latest version will exit the beta stage.

Apple’s rumored television set has been the talk of the blogosphere lately, leading many to wonder what the company has up its sleeve as it enters the television-manufacturing world. However, as 9to5Mac’s Seth Weintraub notes in an article posted Friday, nobody has said much about late Apple founder Steve Jobs’ comments about an Apple TV at last year’s D8 conference since the device came back into the news.

“You just end up with a table full of remotes, clutter of boxes, bunch of different UIs, and that’s the situation we have today. The only way that’s ever going to change is if you go back to step one and tear up the set top box and restart from scratch with a redesigned UI and present it to the consumer in a way they’re willing to pay for it,” he told an audience member during a question-and-answer session at D8. “Right now there’s no way to do that. So that’s the problem with the TV market.”

A TV set was rumored to be one of Jobs’ favorite potential projects before he passed away earlier this month. Although he focused on the iPhone and iPad lines until his untimely passing, it looks like the TV project is finally gaining traction at Apple.

“The TV is going to lose until there is a better go-to market, or there’ll just be a bunch of TIVOs. That’s the fundamental problem. It’s not a problem of technology, it’s a go-to-market technology,” he said at D8.

Comex’s JailbreakMe 3.0 is currently the only jailbreak to work with the iPad 2 computer tablet, but it looks like that exploit will have to make room for the iPhone Dev-Team’s upcoming iOS 5 jailbreak. Although there’s still “lots of work left,” the untethered exploit will support Apple’s second-generation tablet.

“The good news is that the iPhone Dev-Team is hard at work on developing a jailbreak solution for the iPad 2 under iOS 5… A second generation iPad running iOS 5 has indeed been jailbroken, though as MuscleNerd notes, this is a very preliminary’ solution. There are ‘lots of hurdles left, no ETAs,’” reports Joe White in an article posted Friday on AppAdvice.

MuscleNerd is one of the more prominent members of the iPhone Dev-Team renowned for its top-notch jailbreaks of the iOS mobile operating system. Comex’s exploit was released in June and quickly caused problems for Apple, who had gone to great lengths to make the iPad 2 as secure as possible.

“Currently, the iPad 2 can be jailbroken using the Web-based JailbreakMe solution. However, this does not support iPad 2 devices running iOS 5 (the highest version JailbreakMe supports is iOS 4.3.3),” White notes. “Furthermore, while a tethered jailbreak solution is available for iOS 5 devices, this doesn’t support the iPad 2 or the iPhone 4S.”

The iPhone 4S has received plenty of press coverage over the past few weeks, with some pundits lauding its new Siri voice-recognition application and others trying to figure out why some units have such low battery life. Up until now, though, no one has written at length about the insurance plans that come with Apple’s latest smartphone. In a recent article, Digital Trends’ Kelly Montgomery has all you need to know about insuring your phone so that you’re covered if it gets lost or broken.

“The problem with the latest and greatest smartphones is that along with their bright screens and spectacular features comes a hefty retail price tag… This is all well and good, but what happens if you break the glass on your phone or drop it in water while you don’t have a carrier upgrade available?” she writes. “You can either take the risk of having to fork over that rather large chunk of change should you break your phone (for accidental damage) or you can pay a much smaller price for an insurance plan that will cover hardware malfunctions as well as idiotic accidents.”

While the iPhone 4S currently retails for $649, Apple’s warranty program, Apple Care+, only costs $99 for two years and completely covers two accidents. Meanwhile, wireless carriers AT&T and Verizon both offer protection plans for the iPhone, which cost around $10 per month.

The battery life problem that has plagued many iPhone 4S models has been a mystery for Apple and its customers over the past few weeks, its source elusive as the company searched for a cure. However, a new report suggests that constant time zone checks could be to blame for drained 4S batteries all over the globe.

“There may be light at the end of the tunnel. Switching one little toggle in iOS 5?s Settings app may hold the key to curing your iPhone 4S battery,” writes Oliver Haslam for iDownloadBlog. “See, it appears that iOS 5?s GM release introduced a bug that causes the Setting Time Zone function to keep the location tracking circuitry running constantly, draining battery power considerably. Switching it off may mean that your iPhone will no longer set its own time zone when you travel, but that’s a small price to pay for having your iPhone last more than 12 hours on a full charge.”

While not all iPhone 4S owners have had to deal with a frustratingly-low battery life over the past couple of weeks, a good amount have. The iPhone 4S was released to much fanfare earlier this month, breaking sales records thanks to several impressive features and specs, ironically including improved battery life.

Those well-versed in the iPhone and all of its functions and capabilities are surely aware that double-tapping the home button while on the lock screen pulls up a window that allows users to control their music. New jailbreak tweak SuperMusic expands that feature, supplementing its standard buttons with several advanced functions.

“SuperMusic is a jailbreak tweak that aims to add more options to the music controls that appear on your Lock screen,” writes Jeff Benjamin in a recent review for iDownloadBlog. “In addition to the basic back, pause/play, and forward buttons, SuperMusic adds fast-forward, rewind, stop, shuffle, and a full track listing of your music library right on your Lock screen.”

The tweak is currently available through the Cydia jailbreak store for just $1. The latest version requires that jailbreakers are running iOS 4.1 or higher. According to Benjamin, SuperMusic is yet to be perfected in its current state, although he says it has potential.

“SuperMusic, while certainly a valiant attempt, needs a little work on the design front,” the writer continues. “It’s a good idea, but it simply crams too many options on the Lock screen at once. Hopefully further updates will resolve the aesthetic issues, because otherwise this could be a handy tweak.”