Articles by Mike Overbo
Download Files on iPhone’s MobileSafari
If you’ve hacked your iPhone, there are a few banner apps that popped up last night. The first app comes from a hacker by the name of Hachu, and it allows you to download files via MobileSafari on the iPhone directly. The initial release appears to support only zip and tar files, but if you’re comfortable adding .plist files, the thread is chock full of different MIME declarations to allow the plugin to download many different files to your iPhone’s /var/root/Downloads folder. One of the key things I’ve been missing about the iPhone! [image credit]
Foundation of Wi-Fi wireless sync for iPhone
The second app that is crazy useful if you’ve hacked your iPhone is iSync for iPhone by Francisios. If you’ve been hoping for wireless syncing with your iPhone, it’s accomplished via rsync, a remote syncing protocol that’s been around for quite a while and is very common and stable. The project is ambitious as evidenced by the project goals:
- Synchronize iTunes library over Wi-Fi
- Synchronize Photos over Wi-Fi
- Synchronize Bookmarks, Contacts etc over Wi-Fi
French mobile carrier Orange reported that they’ve sold about 30,000 iPhones in the first five days of the iPhone launch. Half of the buyers are new customers. Orange’s target for the first month is 50,000 to 100,000 so it looks like they’ll be fine there. For next year, they’re hoping for around 500,000 iPhone customers.
After a week of using the Treo 680, I have to say that it’s pretty much the same as I remember it. I used the 680 as my primary phone for about half a year, and I’ve reviewed it twice already. I won’t claim to be the most knowledgeable 680 user out there; that honor would certainly be bestowed to many, many users in our forum before I would even enter consideration for it. I’ve had a lot to say about Palm OS, generally favorable I suppose, but there are caveats. I’ve said as much in the TreoCentral TreoCast, but I’ve never had an opportunity like this one to really distill thirty podcasts and a few dozen hours of listening into a manifesto of what’s good and what’s bad about Palm OS, and what I really think about their Linux venture, and why Palm is on their current path.
When I say the King is dead, I don’t mean that the 680 is a bad device, or that there’s no reason to use Palm OS, or that anyone that uses it is dumb. Far from it, I think the 680 is pretty high up on my list. It’s still a good phone. If I thought Palm OS was dumb or not relevant, I wouldn’t do the TreoCentral TreoCast. It boils down to two things with Palm OS: the hardware and the software. The hardware will see updates. There will probably be more Palm OS GSM phones to come out. Better cameras, 3G, smaller form factors, the whole shebang. When it comes out, it will probably be a compelling upgrade for Palm OS users. But I don’t think we’ll see a significant software update for Palm OS in the next two years. While some may accuse that it’s unfair to say “the king is dead” alluding to Palm OS, it’s not accurate to say the king is alive, either. But still, there are always these persistent rumors about faked deaths and random sightings…
Klausner Technologies Inc. has filed a $360 million lawsuit against AT&T and Apple for allegedly violating two of Klausner’s voicemail patents. Klausner has brought other people to task on the two patents in question before — once for AOL, and once for Vonage. Klausner has also sued Apple before for patents pertaining to the long-gone Apple Newton; Apple ended up licensing the patents back then.
Everyone was talking about Burst’s patents too and and the hundred bajillion dollar lawsuits there, but my guess is that Apple will be fighting this one tooth and nail — it seems that Apple would rather pay their lawyers to get patent-holding companies’ patents tossed than pay for patents. Klausner Tech is apparently website-less, leading me to believe that it’s a patent-holdings troll company
The unlocked German iPhones are no more — the Judge for the Vodafone vs. T-Mobile lawsuit reversed the injunction that required T-Mobile to sell unlocked iPhones. And now that they don’t have to sell the iPhone unlocked, they’re not going to — the unlocked iPhone is gone from Germany. The officially unlocked iPhone is still available in France for much less than it was in Germany anyway. Vive le revolution!
The iPhone edged out the entirety of all Windows CE-based devices in web usage according to data provided by Market Share at Hitslink.com. The iPhone came in at #10 with 0.09%, whereas Windows CE weighed in at 0.06% for #11. You read that, Dieter? We’re #10! We’re #10! The iPod on their list, which I’m forced to assume is the iPod Touch, shows up at around 0.01%. We’re #10 and #20! We’re #10 and #20!
Of course, the list is dominated by the big desktop operating systems, but there are a few other interesting gems on the list: The Sidekick / Hiptop shows up at #13 with 0.02%, and Nokia’s S60 Symbian OS shows up at #14 with 0.01%. The PSP just edges out the iPod Touch for #19 at 0.01%, and what appears to be a mobile version of Apple’s WebCore shows up again at #24 with 0.00% — possibly one of Nokia’s internet tablet devices.
Raffi Krikorian of Synthesis Studios wrote to inform me that they’ve reverse-engineered how the Starbucks button works. Most of the Starbucks shops out there aren’t going to get the hookup with wi-fi for about a year. I asked them about it, and they’ll be disclosing the process soon.
“we managed to figure out how to get the starbucks button to show up on our iphones — [if you happen to be in] Boston, MA — then you can pop by our offices to check it out. we were too impatient to wait for the starbucks in boston to get the starbucks button our iphones, so we took matters into our own hands
It’s always nice to see folks making their own fun. This fun was apparently done with a laptop, an iPhone, and a train ticket to NY, as you can see here. Thanks to Raffi for the tip!
Gizmodo reports that the creators of iPhone unlocking app AnySIM have considered open-sourcing their application to spread their code far and wide, hopefully picking up many new coders and eyeballs in the process. They’ve apparently floated the idea about for a while, and found that no one objected to the deal. They then put the idea to the community at hackint0sh, a popular iPhone hacking forum and AnySIM’s main site. Reading from the threads on hackint0sh, it appears that initially most folks advocate keeping the source closed; if you’d rather read a more open-source friendly version of the same discussion there’s always slashdot. [image credit Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo]
George Hotz, the eminent iPhone hacker that was part of the team that first unlocked their iPhones, continues to hack away at the security that prevents iPhone users from mucking around with activations, unlocks, and unofficial 3rd party applications. Specifically, he found a couple of errors in the bootloader that theoretically should allow folks to install custom firmware to their iPhone, or just re-flash earlier, less locked versions of their cell radio. One of the hacks uses hardware, the other uses software. It seems that he’s doing well at RIT and I’m glad to see that he hasn’t moved on to other devices.
Mark Sullivan of PC World compiled a list of five technology groups that frequently conspired to be anti-consumer. That, or they were really just a bunch of jerks. Well, AT&T makes the list twice, showing up in the list for various groups they belong to at #3 and #4. Well, they kind of show up in #5 too — #5 is a critique of most wireless carrier parties involved in the 700 MHz auction that Google’s part of. What kept AT&T from being at #1 and #2? Big pharma and the recording industry. Not too shabby!
