October 2007: Monthly Archive

We are now launching the cool project we were hinting at in the last podcast: the Smartphone Round Robin. For the next 2 or three weeks, all of the editors of the various Smartphone Experts sites will be using one of the “other” smartphones out there.

For me, this week, it means using a BlackBerry 8310. For Dieter of WMExperts, it means using a Treo 680. for Jennifer of TreoCentral, it means using her iPhone. And for Kevin of CrackBerry.com, it means using the AT&T Tilt. There are rules that we’ve all got to follow — we all have to give the device a full shakedown. I’ll be posting an article later today about my first few days with the Curve, and then a full article on Friday.

This week, I’ll be posting a few articles about the strengths and weaknesses of using a BlackBerry. I’ve already got a few posts in at CrackBerry.com.

So what’s in it for you? Well, there’s a chance to win a prize: a smartphone of your choice and plenty of coupons to spend at the store associated with it. Just leave a comment in any Round Robin thread in the forums. Four sites, four chances to win per day. Just head on over to the Smartphone Round Robin update page for the deets.

Leopard sales are off to a honking strart. According to Apple the company sold a prodigious 2 million copies of the new OS in the first weekend since its official launch at 6:00pm on Friday. Several thousand Mac fanboys (and girls) stood in long lines, similar to those witnessed during iPhone’s launch, eagerly waiting to grope Apple’s new kitty-clad OS. How many copies were sold to Microsoft’s Research lab? Oh, we’ll have to wait for the next version of Windows to see what features Microsoft’s bovine borrows from Apple’s feline.

Astonishingly l was not among the rabble. I’m saving my spare change for the purchase of a MacBook Pro, which will come with Leopard pre-installed. As General Patton once said… “I never pay for the same real estate twice.”

Read the press release after the break.

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iNdependence 1.2.5 (Mac only, sorry Winlosers) is out and ready to liberate iPhones running firmware 1.1.1. This release comes complete with full SSH support, as well as anySIM 1.1 pre-installed… for those of you crazy brave enough to brick unlock your iPhone.

Now before you go trotting off to download this app on your Mac, like the slutty iCrack whore that you are, a word of warning: Unlocking, be it through anySIM or other hackery, can be a risky endeavor that may result in damaging your iPhone. The process used by such apps involves monkeying with iPhone’s baseband settings, the all important and tightly guarded driver software that controls phone connectivity, or lack thereof. If something should go wrong during the unlock execution, your iPhone becomes an expensive paperweight. At least until such time as the hacking community can create a fix to reverse the damage. So I do advise caution, and common sense… two qualities that are sorely lacking in me.

Read

There’s now an instant method to get third party apps on your iPhone (firmware 1.1.1 only). The same methond works on iPod Touch. I have to say, this is by far the easiest method of hacking the iPhone that I’ve ever seen. This method, which relies on the iPhone TIFF vulnerability, is also incredibly simple to use; much more so than the previous AppTapp installer method for iPhone 1.0. Since it relies on a buffer overflow, I expect this method to stop working as soon as Firmware 1.1.2 is released, which could be any day now.

All you have to do is point your iPhone browser at jailbreakme.com, confirm the wish to jailbreak, read some stuff, scroll down, select ‘Install AppSnapp’, wait for Safari to quit, and wait. Your iPhone or iPod Touch should restart automatically, and when it’s all done, you’ll have Installer.app ready and willing for you to install 3rd party apps!

This method of installing 3rd party apps doesn’t require any computer software, you just have to go to the website on your iPhone browser and follow the instructions. Again, the site makes efficacious use of the TIFF exploit that’s been talked about before, so if using a security vulnerability to install software freaks you out, don’t go to the site I’ve posted after the cut.

Conversely, f you think that using a buffer overflow to install software is awesome, 31337, or k-rad, there’s a link for you and your iPhone after the break.

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Apple is now refusing cash for the purchase of iPhones. They now require a credit card for purchase, and the limit for the number of iPhones you can purchase is now two. Apple stopped accepting Apple Store gift cards for redemption. The move is legal — they’re not obligated to sell you anything, and they can impose the extra restrictions.

This definitely isn’t the most customer-friendly policy I’ve ever seen; most kids aren’t going to have their own credit card. If Apple wants to obsessively manage their supply of iPhones for the holiday season, no amount of bad press is going to change their mind.

I spent a bunch of time getting Leopard installed and set up on my mac to find out what goodies it would bring to the iPhone. It looks like syncing notes from the iPhone to Mail might have been pulled just before it was ready, or that it’s going to come in a future iPhone update. When I tried to change the default font in an edited note from Marker Felt to anything else, I’m given this warning message:

“Convert this note to rich text format?
Changing the style or formatting requires that this note be converted to rich text format. Rich text notes may not be editable on iPhone and other devices.”

And in other news, it looks like Apple hasn’t made up their mind whether or not we’ll be able to edit rich-text notes in the future. The fact that there’s a warning at all indicates that we should be able to edit notes on the computer and have them sync to the iPhone.

According to a leaked blurb spotted on the Boy Genius Report, Apple will be launching iPhone on Rogers on December 7th. It’s a leaked ad, and they note that the trademark dispute could prevent this from being the final image, not to mention the final date. On behalf of our northern neighbors, I hope that Apple is able to wrest as much change as they can out of Rogers for the sake of our northern neighbors, I keep reading that the data rates are exorbitant.

DataViz will likely be making versions of their popular desktop software for the iPhone as soon as Apple releases the SDK in February. This means that iPhone owners will be able to create and edit Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations and the like. DataViz seems excited to get RoadSync and Passwords Plus on the iPhone as well, but it looks like they want to gauge demand before they commit to anything. There’s a page they’ve set up so you can pledge your intent — they want you to seal the deal. [via]

While I was gone at CTIA, there’s been a bunch of things that have happened that I didn’t get time to properly write about. So today, we’ll have a bit of an iPhone news smörgåsbord. There’s been a fair amount of news, a fair amount of not-news, and some of the things that I’ve been reading are just plain wrong.

Apple Dealing with Film-Makers Directly for iTunes
Apple has sidestepped some of the major studios for some films, opting instead to deal directly with film-makers. This could be a sign of things to come — it would be great to not have to report every major film-studio or TV channel contract tiff.

Apple iPhone Dev Center
Apple has created a web site devoted to developers that are interested in putting their programs on the iPhone. Apple is calling it the iPhone Dev Center, and it’s a repository of tips, tricks, and guidelines to follow should anyone want to make an iPhone web app. It’s also probably a list of instructions that one would have to follow to get listed as a featured application on Apple’s web app listing.

Molson Reveals iPhone on Rogers in January?
For any Canadian readers, Molson ran a contest that had an iPhone as the prize. They had a disclaimer on the iPhone prize, stating that it couldn’t be activated on the Rogers network until January. So, odds are pretty good that the iPhone will be out in Canada in January. Molson has since pulled the language for the contest, saying they have no idea when anything is coming out ever. And they never had any idea. (images below via Electronista)

Is the iPhone Running Leopard?
There’s an article at Wired that delves deeper into Jobs’ open letter about 3rd party applications on the iPhone and the connection to Leopard. One of the tidbits that Jobs talks about briefly is signing applications, and Wired has a good look into what that would mean for 3rd party iPhone apps. And, there’s some discussion whether the iPhone is based off of Leopard or not: “It’s not known for sure at this point, but all indications are that the iPhone is a Leopard-based device,” as stated by Carl Howe, analyst at Blackfriars. It clearly is. Witness the uname -a of my laptop on 10.4 vs. the uname -a of my iphone:

The important bit there is the kernel version. Apple releases the OSX frameworks to correspond with kernel versions of darwin for every version of OSX. The iPhone has been running Leopard (9.0) since it came out in June. My 10.4 laptop is running darwin 8.10.0, which corresponds to 10.4.10.

iPhone Security Faults
Meanwhile, there’s been a rash of complaints about the iPhone’s security. You may have seen headlines that compare the iPhone to Windows 95, for example. It’s of course, a loaded comparison, made for sensationalism. You could just as well compare the iPhone’s security to Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows XP if you’re logged in as an administrator (which is everybody — you can barely run Office as a limited user). But, Windows 95 gets the headline. Since the iPhone is made of UNIX, user separation is built-in, expect apps to run as something other than administrator/root/super-user when the SDK update comes out. Perhaps earlier; we can’t know as Apple isn’t commenting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that ‘run as root’ is a good security model. It’s so bad, it’s not even a security model.

iPhone de-bricking: re-virginizer tool available
The Elite team posted a re-virginizer tool that people can use to restore the ability to upgrade. This tool locks the iPhone with the proper bits in place on the iPhone radio; some of the free iPhone unlock tools wrote stuff to the iPhone baseband radio that was invalid; this led to bricked phones when it came time to update the firmware to 1.1.1.

AT&T Upgrading Core Network
Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, was interviewed recently and he talked about many things concerning the iPhone and AT&T’s network. Their core should make for faster downloads for anything that uses AT&T’s networks, wired or wireless. That means us: anyone using an iPhone should see a smidgen of a benefit, but the real help comes when we’re using 3G fast internet iPhones.

Trick or Treat, smell my feet, give me some wallpaper for my iPhone or I’ll Toilet Paper your house.

As a peace offering for being absent for nearly a week due to illness, I’m giving you boys and girls a truckload of Halloween themed wallpaper. Tripling the usual dose of eight. It’s my way of saying I’m sorry, and deterring any of you from leaving burning bags of doo doo on my virtual doorstep. So here you go. Enjoy them, but do be sure to wash your sticky candy-stained fingers before touching my wallpapers. I won’t have it.

Download them after the break.

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