January 2008: Monthly Archive

Ouch! According to this thread on the Apple forums (via TUAW), AT&T users from Chicago to Milwaukee to St. Louis to Kansas City aren’t able to get online via EDGE. That’s a major black-eye for AT&T — and of course it doesn’t just affect iPhone users. Things are supposed to get running again by the end of the day …unless it take until February 5th. I’m based down in Florida so everything’s in the clear.

You down?

Update: Gizmodo tells us what’s going on:

However, an insider who works on networks dropped me a line as to why AT&T’s 3G network is having these sporadic issues today: apparentely, six GGSNs “rolled over”. (GGSNs are gateways between wireless and regular networks.)

The Speck SeeThru Case ($29.95) for the Apple iPhone is a hard plastic case that also comes with a belt holster. When I saw Speck at Macworld, I was impressed with their wide array of cases and also with their clip/stand system. After some time with their SeeThru case, I continue to be impressed.

Read on for the full review!

Read the rest of this entry »

We already told you that 1.1.3 hasn’t been all it’s cracked up to be, but one of the issues with the ROM slipped by us. Namely: some people have been experiencing SMS messages getting listed out of order. Threaded text is the best thing since, well, SMS, but it doesn’t do much good if your texts are all out of order.

The problem arises when you don’t have your iPhone’s clock set to update automatically from the network time and your iPhone thinks it’s one time, the carrier another. So presumably the SMS app lists incoming texts by their carrier-based timestamp and yours by the internal timestamp — a mismatch means out of order texts.

The fix – turn on automatic updating and deal with whatever hassles that might bring you if you travel between time zones a lot.

(via Engadget Mobile)

So we know that jailbreaking 1.1.3 is possible (but a bit of a pain), but now we’re also hearing that the pain doesn’t necessarily stop once you’ve finished the jailbreak. Gizmodo is reporting on various issues including the breakage of Google Location and of various native apps. The latter isn’t too surprising, as there are lots of internal changes in 1.1.3 that seem to be getting the iPhone ready for official apps. How’s that? Well most applications don’t run as root and there’s even a hidden application key that programs will need to run. (That last means that hackers might someday be able to provide native apps without resorting it iTunes)

If all that doesn’t scare you and you haven’t updated to 1.1.3 yet, a couple of 13-year-olds have released an over-the-air solution for you over at http://ijailbreak.com/. 1.1.3 folks will need to downgrade to take advantage of it, though.

Sadly,the issues don’t appear to be limited to just people who are hacking away at their iPhones. Folks are noticing that 1.1.3 seems to be dropping calls and handing Bluetooth poorly (though there are some ugly fixes for that).

You? How’s 1.1.3 been treating ya?

I’m going to come right out and say it: I hate Sudoku. Don’t get me wrong, I can do Sudoku puzzles and I even know some of the tricks and (god help me) the terminology for the various combinations of empty boxes. But it’s not my bag, my bag is crossword puzzles. So seeing this pop up inside installer.app is welcome.

It looks like getting the .puz files is a bit of a hassle — it would be better to have a source list of online puz files, but these are getting tougher and tougher to find these days anyway. Otherwise, great native app. Come on, you have an iPhone, which makes you cool. Language puzzles are so much cooler than mere number and logic puzzles. If you’re jailbroken, hop on over to installer.app and give it a shot.

Learn more here: iCrossword at Rustywagon (via)

You already know that the iPhone offers up the real internet, not the “Watered-down, Mobile Version, kinda sorta looks like the internet, internet.” What you may not have realized is that the “real internet” basically consists of 3 parts:

1. iPhone news (we got ya covered)
2. Porn
3. Pictures of cats with amusing captions (in Kitty Pidgin)

Well, folks, the third part of the real internet is now optimized for your iPhone, in the form of i can has cheezburger, iPhone edition. What better way to show off your new toy to your friends than with cute asplosions? (via TUAW)

My favorite innovation on the Treo 700w was touchscreen photo speed dial. Instead of a list of names, you have a grid of faces you can tap to call. The iPhone, mysteriously, doesn’t take advantage of its gigantic and gorgeous screen to do the same. That’s a pity, too, because I can recognize the face of the person I want to call much more quickly than I can their name.

No More!

Step 1: Make a bunch of thumbnails of the faces of your favorite contacts. Upload them to a server (or Flickr, or wherever) and copy their image addresses.

Step 2: Go grab use the little hack here to add speed dial links to your home screen, but as the “Advanced” instructions suggest, paste the URL of your favorites’ face thumbnails (from step one) onto the end. (No Jailbreak required)

Step 3: Move all your cute photo speed dial faces onto their very own Home Screen page. Voila, you can now hit the home button, swipe over to your speed dial screen, and there are up to 16 faces per page you can dial by tapping.

(Thanks to rener for the inspiration!)

There’s a lot of talk today (here and here for starters) about the iPhone’s sales numbers from Apple’s quarterly conference call and how they didn’t match up with AT&T’s numbers from their conference call. The gist is that Apple sold 3.7 million iPhones and AT&T had about 2 million iPhone subscribers. So where are the rest?

Of course, many were sold overseas, but most people very much doubt that Apple sold 1.7 million of them. Which has led to speculation that as many as a third of all iPhones have been purchased and unlocked. That’s a lot, and it strikes me as an unrealistically high number. Naturally, we’d like Apple to help us understand this riddle. Naturally, we are sure they won’t. Fake Steve Jobs agrees:

Why not just break out the numbers and share more information and tell Toni Sacconaghi and his pals on Wall Street exactly where all the iPhones are? Well, we’re not going to do that. We’re not going to break out any numbers or share any more information on this topic or try to explain how we arrived at the 4 million figure. We’re just not going to do it, so stop asking.

It could be that Apple’s number includes those shipped out to AT&T (and international carriers) for them to sell but haven’t actually sold yet. It could be that hundreds of thousands of people bought iPhones just because they’re really shiny. Whatever it is, it’s clear that a significant number of these un-accounted for iPhones have been unlocked.

Looks like our set of Native iPhone Apps articles are relevant again for a whole swath of people, as it looks like version 1.1.3 has not only been Jailbroken, but that Jailbreak is now live for both Windows and Mac. This comes after some drama yesterday regarding whether or not the impending Jailbreak release was some sort of prank. The Unofficial Apple Weblog, as is often does, had the last word and said they knew it was coming, and come it did.

So, 1.1.3′ers, will you be (re)Jailbreaking your iPhone?

We’re all familiar with the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution, right? The one that states that you’re secure from “unreasonable searches and seizures?” Right, well, we all know from our TV-watching that the key word there is “unreasonable.” Turns out that the most-common of police encounters, the traffic stop, could potentially open you up to having your smartphone searched.

Basically, if the police officer arrests you for real, he or she can then search your person — including your iPhone — without a warrant:

Adam Gershowitz, an assistant professor at the South Texas College of Law, raises an interesting point about the iPhone and similarly tricked-out mobile devices: If the police stop you and find some legal cause to arrest you, they are probably free, under judicial interpretations of the Fourth Amendment, to search the device. – Machinist

That’s a scary thought, actually, because it’s one thing to search a car, but to search an iPhone is tantamount to searching your entire life. Think about it: email, browsing history, received phone calls, all of it.

Of course, there’s always the chance that when this gets tested for real in court, that court will set a precedent that will overturn this. As of right now, though, the ability to do that search is the best interpretation of current law.

What do to? Apparently if you just set a screen-lock password, a warrant is required. I’m not just saying this as a PSA to criminals, either — setting the screen lock is a good idea all around. If your iPhone gets stolen, welcome to the special circle of hell reserved for those whose identity has been stolen. Not. Fun. (and no, I’m not just talking about iPhones, either.)

So that screen lock is a hassle, but it might just be worth it, no?