Prominent names in the iOS hacker community are making progress in their efforts to deliver a jailbreak for iPhones and iPads powered by the A5 chip.

A new update from Yiduo David Wang, also known as Planetbeing on Twitter, reveals that the A5 jailbreak is one step closer to completion:

“And we’re out of the sandbox with @saurik’s invaluable help! (well, at least there’s a PoC) 😀 Turning out more complex than X-Gold 618,” he wrote on Twitter.

For those of you not familiar with what a sandbox is, a sandbox refers to a environment where software and potentially dangerous operations can be tested in isolation, thus reducing the chance of collateral damage to the primary system environment resulting from a poorly designed and/or malicious program.

According to iDownloadBlog, “X-Gold 618” refers to the iPhone 4 baseband chip that planetbeing hacked a while ago with the help of MuscleNerd, a member of the infamous iPhone Dev Team.

Another well-listed hacker in the iOS community, the Chronic Dev Team’s Pod2g, offers a more detailed look at their progress via a new blog entry.

“Here are some news about the current work on the A5 research,” his post begins.

“@planetbeing escaped from the sandbox with the help of @saurik. Thanks to their awesome work, there should be nothing left blocking for the A5 jailbreak,” he writes.

“Now it should be a matter of days. Still no precise ETA of course. We all want this to be finished ASAP, we’re getting tired!”, Pod2g concludes.

So while the hackers are not sure when the public release will occur, Pod2g is confident that this is going to be relatively soon.

A5 devices include the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2. The latter has been in the wild for almost a year, just to give you an idea of how hard it has been for the two aforementioned crews to crack it.

The iPhone 4S uses an almost identical A5 chip which means that whatever hack is released in the coming days, it will offer the same type of jailbreak for both devices.