August 2007: Monthly Archive

Remember when I said you should wait to let someone else find out if this site is legitimate? Well, according to Engadget, they are indeed legitimate. Engadget doesn’t have a copy of the software, don’t know if the 6 hackers that toiled away on it will release source to the public, or if they’ll charge beaucoup bucks for it, or when they will have a system in place for you to unlock your iPhone, or what. They just know that it works. Here’s the rundown:

• You still have to activate using the usual tools
• APN settings were included in the 1.0.1 update in secret
• You can set preferred carriers if you don’t want to roam
• YouTube doesn’t work
• No visual voicemail
• Takes a couple of minutes and is painless
• Gizmodo did not post a Death Star picture; they’re saving that for the iPhoneDevWiki folks or some other free unlock.

We still don’t know for sure the bugs fixed by update 1.0.2, but it looks like the speculation has been condensed into an article that speculates that it was for wi-fi and camera updates. In another totally unrelated site, someone waxes about how easy it has been to update the firmware on the iPhone, the rate at which updates have come, and the rate of feature improvement, especially compared to other devices. You can read that other totally unrelated not-at-all-a-sister-site-to-the-first-site here.

It’s apparently less than 1%.

Apparently, forensic research teams have difficulty with OSX and the iPhone in particular. They also mention that the iPhone lends itself to having a lot of personal data about you stored on it, much more than the average phone they claim. Since they have to turn the iPhone on to get any data out of it, it’s harder to convince a jury that the iPhone hasn’t been tampered with. Quoth Amber Schneider, a CEO of a forensics team:

“The iPhone is evil. It’s Mac OS X, and it’s a completely closed system.”

Huh. Now I wonder if the evil comes from the Mac OSX part, or from the closed system part, or if you have to have both of them to get to the evil.

VoiceSignal, makers of popular speech recognition software on Treos, have released a demo of their software for the iPhone. If it’s like the Treo software, you record a command, upload it to VoiceSignal via the internet, and then it passes the command down via the internet. I have a hard time picturing this as a web app.

Pictures of the next version of the iPod have been leaked and already pulled via threatening letters from Apple legal. iLounge has posted an artist’s rendition of the pictures they pulled, so you can still get an idea of what the next one will look like. It basically looks like the iPod 5G with a drastically shortened body. Or a doublewide iPod Nano 2G. You could just look at the pictures at iLounge….

figure 1: this is the soldering you’d need to do

The full ten steps to unlocking an iPhone have been posted at iPhoneJTAG by George Hotz, aka Geohot. It’s a ten step process, beginning with step 1. It’s not as difficult a process as I expected it to be, except the precise scratching and soldering process. You have to scratch away at one of those tiny wires on the iPhone, and solder other wires to it directly. I imagine that the folks at the iPhone dev wiki will still be hard at work on unlocking the iPhone via a software method; not everyone has got a steady soldering hand.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRKIDdIaFyE[/youtube]

Oh snap! This video has all the best qualities of human expression - mockery, sarcasm, ridicule, taunting…reminds me of middle school, minus the bully who stole my lunch money.

Take that, Microsoft…and Greg Johnson! I’ll take back all that lunch money you stole from me in $50s and $100s.

Read

After hours of active use, your iPhone’s screen will become filled with more greasy fingerprints and smudges than the front doors of your local McDonalds. How can you see through all that film? Wipe if off? No, be creative. Express your inner artist. Let your fingers inspire you. Rub your iPhone’s slippery glass surface in delicate strokes, forming shapes and contours. Create images and silhouettes from the deposited facial oil. Where others see a smudgy screen, I see the face of a clown.

Now spray Windex onto a sheet of paper towel, lightly dampened. Then clean your filthy screen, and get back to work. Stop wasting time.

On Tuesday Apple released a system update for iPhone that claims to have fixed a number of undisclosed bugs. Like nearly every other iJunkie I eagerly plunged into the installation process, anxious to learn what performance tweaks might await. My initial hope was the unrelenting Mail issue I lamented about had been fixed in this release, and I think some have. But not all. Read the rest of this entry »