Earlier today, iOS 5.0.1 hacker extraordinaire pod2g said that the long anticipated iPad 2 and iPhone 4S jailbreak was “almost ready to pop”. Considering he’s been promising the jailbreak any time now for a couple weeks, though, what does “almost ready to pop” really mean?

It means keep hitting “refresh” on your browser. pod2g has just written a new blog post, and he’s now promising the jailbreak in just a few hours, courtesy of a tool called Absinthe.

pod2g writes:

I know the wait was long, too much long, but it’s about to end! You’d be able to free your iPhone in some hours. A tool named Absinthe and developped by the Chronic Dev Team will install the untether on your device. Also the iPhone Dev Team will release a CLI (command line) tool to help diagnose issues and repair things if it goes wrong. This is a little scary I know, but the chance you break something is really small, since we made lots of tests to verify the process on different devices. But it is the first time we use the backup / restore functions of iTunes to install software, and there are maybe things we are not aware of. As you already know, different security researchers put a lot of energy to work out the different issues we had to install the untether on new devices.

The Absinthe tool will unlock the iPhone 4S running iOS 5.0, 5.0.1 (9A405 and 9A406) or any iPad 2 running iOS 5.0.1.

Keep checking Cult of Mac: we’ll update as soon as Absinthe goes live, along with jailbreaking guides for the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S.