August 2007: Monthly Archive

Boingo Wireless, purveyors of fine not-for-free wi-fi hotspots across the galaxy will be making 13 of those hotspots free. If you’re going to get into a plane one of these days, in one of the following 13 hotspots, and you’re using an iPhone, it may be worth remembering this list:

• AZO – Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport
• BNA – Nashville International Airport,
• BWI – Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport,
• DTW – Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport,
• EWR – Newark Liberty International Airport,
• JFK – John F. Kennedy International Airport,
• LGA – LaGuardia Airport,
• MDW – Midway International Airport,
• MSP – Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport,
• OKC – Will Rogers World Airport,
• ORD – O’Hare International Airport,
• STL – Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, and
• YYZ – Toronto Pearson International Airport.

If you’re not at one of those wi-fi hotspots, it’s going to cost you, to the tune of $21.95 per month. [via]

Maybe you’ve heard of ill-fated Microsoft iLoo. Well, someone took at Atech took that idea and ran with it, like they were afraid someone would take it away from them. Anyone want to make bets whether they made a profit on this one? Can we dream for a ‘works with iPhone’ sticker on this must-have accessory? [via camarochris]

Dave Stolte had a nasty surprise in store for him, upon returning from a trip to Eurorpe (with his iPhone) – a $3,000 bill from AT&T. It seems David learned the hard way that AT&T does not offer international roaming with its iPhone data plans.

Two weeks of travel with sporadic AT&T EDGE network usage off and on mixed with wifi when available… $3000. Doing some research, I learned this morning that AT&T offers unlimited international data usage at $70 per month to its Blackberry customers. Here’s my bottom line: I want this same usage plan to be made available to iPhone customers and to be applied retroactively to my account.

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Coolgorilla.com breaks down language barriers and offers a novel way to meet foreign women in bars with the help of its talking translation service. Avoid those embarrassing social faux pas as you stumble to form poorly structured sentences from a book.

Just visit CoolGorilla.com on your iPhone – select any available sentence from the phrase book and your iPhone will repeat it back in the desired native tonque of your guests.

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The folks at the iPhoneDevWiki continue to delight and amaze. They’ve made more discoveries, and have reverse-engineered one of the chip radios (Nucleus) that they need to reverse-engineer. There’s a two-way two-chip communication hurdle to overcome, but they’re a step closer to total unlock, which is their main priority. They still have to co-ordinate the unlocking from the main CPU chip to Nucleus. If you want the gory details, and want to read about baseband memory and the like, check out the post at Gizmodo. If you want the executive summary,

In other words: two doors, two locks, but also one more front to crack this Pandora’s Box open.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has posted a pretty full page of notes and thoughts concerning the recent patch. If you’ve hacked your iPhone, one might say that it’s a definitive guide to what’s going on. Also of note is the user comments: the comments section is where the collected wisdom of the internet has posted the differences they’ve seen in the patch.

So you want to buy an iPhone, but can’t justify the expense to your significant other. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending upon your point of view) decisions like these are often joint decisions with a spouse or partner and here is my advice on how to tip the balance in your favor: it’s about the money. You need to show that the cash you spend does not come from your current operating budget. Yet the cost of the iPhone is enormous.

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Dave Stolte took his iPhone a-wandering to Europe, figuring that AT&T’s roaming charges wouldn’t be so bad. The result? $3000 worth of roaming and data charges. The moral of the story? Hope that the folks at the iPhoneDevWiki figure out how to unlock the phone. All’s well that ends well, though: after getting his story pasted on the front page of BoingBoing, Wired, and a thousand other blogs, AT&T has decided to waive the fees. Moral of the story: if you’re getting screwed, get it on the front page and in front of a lot of eyeballs.

Apple has posted their first update to the iPhone. As has been expected, it’s a patch for the security issues mentioned previously, though there are five vulnerabilities patched in all. Apple’s security note is posted. You can download the patch via iTunes; the iPhone software will be at version 1.01 when all is finished. If you’ve hacked your iPhone, it’s probably worthwhile to restore, update, and then re-hack. It’s also probably worthwhile to figure out what iTunes doesn’t sync over, as you’re going to lose that data. [via, via]