The iPhone hacking bar has been lowered. Significantly lowered, in fact; replacing the command line applications are GUI applications. While it’s true that GUI applications were available, iFuntastic was only for PowerPC Macs. Well, no more. There’s AppTappInstaller, a new GUI app for hacking on OSX, and there’s iBrickr, a GUI app for hacking on Windows. There’s already installation guides available for the faint of heart.
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figure 1: T-Mobile Subscriber GeoHot demonstrates an unlocked iPhone. Necessity is the mother of invention.
According to Ars Technica, an iPhone hacking group has claimed to unlock the phone with the aid of some sophisticated soldering. This, of course, goes well beyond the ken of the average user, but it should give hope to anyone that wants their iPhone unlocked: the hackers hope to have a software unlock within the week. Even if they don’t, they’ll post full instructions on how they did it in a week, so anyone that wants to go through the arduous microsoldering process can do so.
So in one week exactly from this blog post(thats less than the time it takes to ship a turbosim) we will release simple step by step instructions for unlocking, probably not even involving hardware. Sorry about the wait, but I assure you it will be worth it.
It seriously kills me. They unlock the iPhone, some damn fine hacking work, and then they apologize about the wait for it. No apology should be expected.
I noticed a new application is available for the iPhone today, Aquarium v.1.0.0. There’s a clown fish; if you tap the screen, a food pellet appears. The clownfish zooms towards the food, then just chills out. I know, it’s not too thrilling, but I think that’s the part of the poitn with aquarium type games. At any rate, it’s at least a start, like the Zune2 ‘whack-a-zune’ game. I think it will take a bit for the developers to get a handle on how to program well for the iPhone, since the barrier to entry is pretty high.
It looks like they’ve ported over a Z machine text adventure game interpreter, which means you can play Zork on your hacked iPhone.
It looks like the ‘Nintendo vs Apple’ stories are heating up. There are a few more stories today about the “war” that will be going on between the two.
It goes without saying that the results of this “war” will be interesting. Because to even have this war, Apple will need actual games on the iPhone. Besides LighgtsOut, now the 3rd game to claim the honor of ‘1st game on the iPhone’ (there’s also iPhoneDoom and the NES emulator) which showed up in the hacked iPhone’s Installer.app last night.
Gizmodo is reporting that the iPhone can be 100% unlocked with the use of a Turbo SIM card. This SIM card unlock doesn’t use SIM card readers or any other fancy equipment, besides the $80 blank Turbo card that an unlocker would need to buy. The actual unlocking process seems to need information only from the iPhone. You’ll need to have ssh or iPhoneInterface on your iPhone, in the very least, so you can modify some key iPhone files. After the process is done, any SIM card can be used in the iPhone, and apparently on any network. [image: Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo]
The hacking community continues to delight and amaze. Hacker stepwhite has ported the InfoNES core over to the iPhone. It’s not ready for general consumption; the controls apparently suck (as quoted by stepwhite), and it runs too slow to be playable… yet. Other important emulator functions like saving states and cheating outright also not supported, but at the rate that the hacking developer community has been moving, we’ll be playing Xbox 360 games on it by next week. The code is available at Google Code. [via]
Forum members of Hackint0sh have figured out how to unlock an iPhone using a SIM card reader/writer and a blank SIM card. The Phone has reportedly been tested in Europe. The equipment to do so apparently cost $96 US, and we can apparently expect a Gizmodo post later today once they verify that this method works.
In other unlocking news, other hackers have figured out how to dump the full content of NOR memory; this memory dump should ostensibly hold all the information an enterprising hacker would need to unlock the iPhone in software. You know, without $96.
And lastly, I just want to call attention to the neat Star Wars themed photoshops Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo has been posting.
It’s like a real breaking news story. There’s now an unofficial Terminal client for the iPhone. It’s important to note that this Mobile Terminal is not a web app; it’s a real GUI meat-on-the-bones fire-on-the-grill application. The project is hosted at Google code, which is interesting; it could mean an unofficial nod of approval from Apple, as the above gizmodo post details. The Terminal app will be an important development for further hacking at the iPhone, and it’s incredible that it was done without any kind of official SDK from Apple. My hat is off to you, good sirs and ma’ams.
In terms of getting to a place where they can unlock an iPhone and host applications, this is a big step; it means that hackers can interface directly with the iPhone instead of having to reload firmwares, reset the iPhone, test, etc: they can test changes on the fly now. A video is after the break, and you can visit the MobileTerminal.app page directly.
There’s some posts at hackint0sh that indicate the iPhone might have a hardware unlock code, and some entries at iPhone JTAG that might corroborate that. Might, you have to take this with a big grain of salt. A BIG grain; iPhoneDevWiki lists nothing new. Except for their new jailbreak app. Oooh, new jailbreak app! [via]
