August 2007: Monthly Archive

On the internet, no one can hear your bluff. A blog claims to be offering a $100,000 reward to anyone who can produce a free software unlock solution for iPhone, and deliver it by the chimes of midnight tonight. Of course, no information whatsoever is given to back the legitimacy of this claim, such as who its underwriters are so I’d wager this cash payment is coming from someone’s HP deskjet printer. Nothing more than a single email address is available for correspondence, which doesn’t instill confidence.

My favorite quote from the site, which gives good insight into the minds behind this project…

Me and my friends are very involved in the open source community and yet everybody who worked on IRC, now is concerned about getting paid and charging everybody for an unlock software. I can’t believe it, it’s like Linus Torvalds would start charging for compiling the kernel.

Imagine that…expecting payment for your work and talent. Why, it almost sounds like Capitalism!

Yeah, these are a bunch of kids.

I’ll make a counter offer for anyone who can produce such a solution; one shiny wooden nickel. Any takers?

ReadSource

Fanboys aren’t the only ones wanting to install games on iPhone. Developers at Electronic Arts (EA) and PopCap, see iPhone as a viable gaming handheld and a potentially lucrative market. So much so in fact that the folks at PopCap aren’t waiting for Apple to open its walled garden to developers. The popular maker of mobile game titles says iPhone is already on its roadmap for future game development, and has a few projects in the works. Andrew Stein, PopCap’s director of mobile business development recently told Reuters…

“We don’t typically make announcements about what’s in the pipeline, but based on the success of ‘Bejeweled’, we’re looking pretty closely at the iPhone.”

EA echoed similar intentions. Travis Boatman, EA’s Vice President of worldwide studios for the mobile division (there’s a mouthful title, I’d hate to see this guys business card) said…

“We’re huge believers in the iPhone and believe that’s going to be a viable market going forward,” It has an amazing interface for games and there are lots of beautiful things you can do with that touch interface.”

The message here is clear - developers see iPhone as a platform, not a product. Unfortunately Apple still sees things being the other way round, at least publicly. An increasing number of anxious developers aren’t waiting for Apple’s answer, or SDK, and taking initiative. Applications are coming, with or without the blessing of Cupertino.

iPhone as a gaming device - it’s coming folks…slowly but surely.

Read

These wallpapers are pretty good. [via]

Engadget has a brief interview with their lawyer about the legalities of unlocked phones.

Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy buys girl iPhone to express his love. Girl cheats on boy. Boy sells cheating girl’s iPhone on Craigslist.

I love a happy ending.

ReadSource

If you’re hoping to get the free unlock and support the development group that has brought us a bunch of the stuff so far, it looks like they’re accepting paypal.

Our third podcast. Plenty of stuff to talk about, even without the last 5 minutes of the track at the end. We cover the new hardware unlock, the inevitable software unlock, the new ease of hacking the iphone, AT&T, and as we are wont to do, cover the forums a wee spot.

• Our podcast feed
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As usual, our show notes are after the break.

I heard on NPR’s All Things Considered that George Hotz, aka Geohot of the iPhoneDevWiki, is off to college today. I’m sure he will be missed by the iPhoneDevWiki team, I’m unsure if they’ll continue without him. Have a good time in college, and thanks for all of your excellent work with the iPhone unlock. The interview is available on NPR. It looks like he’s put his phone on eBay and made a ton of money off it.

It looks like the unlocking service of UniquePhones.com is ready to unlock the iPhone, but AT&T lawyers have slowed down the process. Their unlocking service was supposed to have been available today; instead, all that is available at their iphoneunlocked.com site is an opportunity to give them your IMEI and your email, in what they call an invite.

It is now 12N EST – the time when we said we would be offering iphone unlocking software to our customers.

We have the software. It works. And we are ready to go.

Seems AT&T is a bit annoyed at the idea. A middle of the night phone call from a Silicon Valley law firm is slowing down the release of the software to you.

Stay tuned.

On their blog, they mention the difficulty of knowing what to do with the code in the event that AT&T bans them from operating an unlocking service. The lawyers will figure that stuff out fairly promptly, I would imagine. I figured this site to be legit, it’s too much work to be a fake and do the linking with uniquephones.com, so I registered for an invite. It looks like they expect to be up and running within the week:

Your details have been stored, expect an invite code in the next few days!

Yes folks, this is the real deal. Remember that shady website that claimed would release a fully software based iPhone unlock solution within 48 hours? Well…they did. So far I have already received reports from users claiming to have iPhones unlocked and functioning on T-Mobile, Rogers, Vodaphone, and Orange networks.

Engadget has posted a fantastic tutorial detailing the process involved to make the unlock magic happen. It’s really straight forward and quite simple. However, I don’t have a second iPhone to act as guinea pig, so I won’t be putting this unlock solution to the test. Feel free to send me your success stories, or mishaps.

By the way, if anyone out there can confirm their unlocked iPhone works with Centennial Wireless I would much appreciate it. I have a couple friends on that network who are just dying to get iPhones.