4 posts tagged “iphone”

Making an iPhone app is not the path to riches it once was. But innovative new apps still keep getting produced. One of the coolest I've seen recently is the upcoming Cabulous app by John Wolpert's upStart Mobile company. On the one hand, Cabulous sits in the hands of cab (taxi) drivers and on the other hand, anyone looking for a cab opens the app and can see the nearest cabs and hail them. At that point, both sides see where the other is, and can move around without missing each other. It is great if you are looking for a cab in a rather low density or difficult area. The biggest winners are actually the cabbies who lose a lot of potential revenue because they are sitting around idle, or when they do go to someone who has hailed them by phone, they are often not there when they turn up.

Today, I was asked about my thoughts on the new Apple iPhone 3G S.

I'm disappointed to not see an iPod Touch with a camera. Basically, I think the iPod Touch should be an iPhone without the phone option. Obviously this is a deliberate decision. I think a lot of people would decide to keep another phone, and supplement it with an iPod Touch.

Obviously the iPhone 3G S is a must have phone for me. I take pictures with the iPhone all the time, and having a higher resolution camera with auto-focus is a compelling improvement. And video will be great too, especially if I can upload it to flickr, and tweet it, just like I do with pictures using our FlickrTweet service. Video will make the extra memory in the phone important.

Not being able to tether with AT&T remains annoying as hell for the time I'm in the US and very mobile, but with limited Internet connectivity. Without tethering, I am confined to Wifi locations for serious work on my laptop (although thanks to Google, this covers all of Mountain View).

The compass in itself is rather boring (even for me with my navigation compass-using background - I just came back from a week sailing in Thailand, plotting our course all the way), but it will probably add some marginal benefit to navigation accuracy, directions and the intuitive user experience. It, along with voice, is probably designed to help kill the in-car GPS navigation system category.

I'm starting to think I need to have a mobile.me account even though it is priced very unfavourably. The features to find and/or wipe an iPhone seem compelling. Although perhaps not enough in themselves to justify the cost, it does start to tip the balance.

The extra speed should be nice. I find I wait ten or twenty seconds at times for the camera app to open.

Of course, most of this stuff I'll just get to use occasionally when I am in the US. Most of the time I will be confined to an iPhone that I can unlock. I will be most interested in seeing if an unlock for the iPhone 3G S becomes available. As an alternatie, it might even be worth a visit to Hong Kong to get a premium priced unlocked iPhone 3G S when they become available there. 

Two quick notes about keeping your iPhone 3G unlocked (see my previous post for how to achieve this).

If you turn your phone off, it may not be able to re-establish a connection to your service provider. It will act as if it were locked. Follow the directions in my previous post for what to do when you have trouble connecting to your provider. These simple steps, using BossPrefs, YellowsnOw commands entered through the terminal application, and flight mode toggling through Preferences.

Note that there is a new iPhone software release, 2.2.1. Do NOT install this release or you will lose your unlock. When you are dealing with an unlocked phone never install an update from Apple until you are sure you can maintain, or re-establish your unlocked state with that update. Currently, 2.2.1 does not have an unlock method available. So wait.  See news.softpedia.com for more information.

OTTAWA -- After a long wait, the hacker community has created a software only unlock for the new Apple iPhone 3G allowing it to be used with (almost) any SIM in any country and with any carrier. However, only about one third of people trying currently report success unlocking their phones. I just managed to successfully unlock one of my phones, and so want to share how I managed to do it.

cydia (Figure 1)

The new unlock hack is called yellowsn0w.  Instructions can be found on the yellowsn0w website. 

The first thing I had trouble doing was figuring out how to get yellowsn0w into my iPhone. I didn't have any trouble jailbreaking my phone using QuickPwn. This made it capable of installing non-Apple approved applications using two new application icons, "Cydia" and "Installer" (see Figure 1). I also had no trouble installing Bossprefs from Cydia's, "Featured Packages" and "Free Applications".  I got a lot of help with this from an AppleiPhoneApps.com tutorial.

After a lot of looking around I realized that the actual yellowsn0w application was not listed in Cydia or Installer. And when I went to the yellowsn0w.com website it showed nothing but a static page. Eventually, I realized you have to manually add yellowsn0w to the Cydia directory. From the Cydia application, you select "Manage"  from the bottom-of-screen menu (see Figure 2), then "Sources" from the center of the screen (see Figure 2), then "edit" from the upper right hand corner (see Figure 3), then enter "apt9.yellowsn0w.com" (see Figure 4). Having manually added yellowsn0w.com to the list of sources, listed under "Entered by User" (see Figure 3), it can be installed like any other, such as Bossprefs.

I followed these instructions, but I still could not get my phone to detect a carrier. I had restored my iPhone from a backup made before the hack attempt. Perhaps this was the problem.  Perhaps I made some sort of mistake somewhere along the line.   But I did eventually get things to work using the following directions posted by Mees on http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/67797811/dont-eat-yellowsn0w. There are a lot of variations on this sort of process, but I can certainly attest that these specific instructions worked flawlessly.

Note that you first need to add the "MobileTerminal" application listed in "Console Utilities & Daemons" in Cydia.

Install Yellowsn0w 0.9.5 with Cydia
Install Bossprefs with Cydia
Install Mobile Terminal with Cydia

Put off everything with Bossprefs ( SSH, 3G, EDGE, WIFI )
Reboot using Bossprefs->Power->Reboot

30 secs after reboot go to terminal, type in:
yellowsn0w -c
yellowsn0w -r

Flight mode on and off, nothing yet.

reboot using bossprefs
flight mode on and off and it worked ;=)

sources (Figure 2)

edit (Figure 3)

enter apt9.yellowsn0w.com (Figure 4)