It was really only a matter of time before the devoted team of iphone hackers managed to crack the latest firmware from Apple. As of last night, a jailbreak solution for the iPhone's 1.1.3 software has been released for both OS X and Windows.
One caveat before you begin the process: in order to get the hacked version of 1.1.3, you'll need to be upgrading from a jailbroken version of 1.1.1 or 1.1.2. I'm not sure if there's a way yet to downgrade from 1.1.3 to an earlier version, but it's likely that one will appear before long or some other loophole will be found.
If you're looking for the full skinny on how to the whole jailbreak thing, you could do much worse than to check out this lengthy tutorial at Lifehacker (it mostly documents the Windows process, but it should be similar for OS X).
Giving it a go? Let us know how it works out for you in the comments below.
Where oh where have all the iPhones gone? Well, according to some, they're sitting on the shelf. The central issues here resides in a disparity between the numbers of iPhones sold that Apple is reporting, and the number that AT&T has activated.
As of December 29th of last year (the end of Apple's Q1 2008), Apple had sold 3.7 million iPhones total, but as of December 31st (the end of AT&T's Q4 2007), AT&T had only activated about 2 million iPhones. iPhone sales from the UK, France, and Germany only accounted for an estimated 350,000 units, leaving around 1.4 million unaccounted for. Back in Q4 2007, Apple COO Tim Cook estimated that 250,000 of the handsets sold at that point were being unlocked; assuming a similar percentage for the Q1 2008 numbers would add another 412,000 to the mix—660,000 in total. That leaves around 740,000 phones still unaccounted for.
So, where are all those phones? At the moment, the guess is that they're "in the channel," which is a fancy-schmany financial analyst way of saying that they're sitting in stores. Of course, this is little more than an educated guessing game: it's possible a substantial number of those phones were given as Christmas presents and not immediately activated, or that the numbers of unlocked phones or international sales are higher than estimated. Apple wouldn't reveal during the Q1 conference call what their target for iPhone inventories was, so it's possible that they just want to make sure they have enough supply to meet demand.
The other alternative is that sales aren't going as well as Apple would like. Though, given the fact that they've managed to sell 4 million in just over six months, it seems likely that they'll meet their goal of 10 million before the end of 2008. No need to panic quite yet.
You know, Apple clearly didn't spend any time at all on the iPhone's camera. I mean come on: no manual controls, no flash, and worst of all, no zoom lens. I mean, come on, what are we supposed to do with that? Only take pictures of things that are close to us? Ridiculous.
Fortunately, the fine folks at Brando—seller of all things crazy—have rolled out a 6x zoom lens for the iPhone. Admittedly, it looks a bit like what I'd expect if you bolted a jet engine onto a Fiat, but hey. I'd like to to explain to you precisely what beenfits you'll get from this lens, but I think Brando's own catalog copy puts it best:
The new design to run of rays can effectively avoid the contortion of image, and makes the super wide angle, the larger luminous flux, the higher visual acuteness, good for color reduction, which makes the high quality of photography.Wait, what?
The design is far from perfect: in order to get the best image, you have to focus the lens by putting it up to your eye, then attaching it to the phone. It comes with a clear plastic case that holds the lens in the correct position, so you don't have to, and there's an included neckstrap, which is guaranteed to make you look like the silliest tourist ever.
But at $19, how can you resist?
[via Red Ferret]
iPhone hacker Nate True has been digging around in update 1.1.3 and he's made a couple of interesting discoveries, most of which shouldn't come as a surprise. The changes basically add up to signifying that the 1.1.3 update appears to be all ready to support applications developed with Apple's forthcoming Software Development Kit. For example, as we've seen with the Web Clip support, you no longer need to hack the Springboard application to support multiple screens of applications or reorder icons; likewise, all programs are run as a user named "mobile" rather than on earlier versions where all apps were run by the root superuser (a dangerous security vulnerability, since root can be used to make all sorts of potentially malicious changes).
But that's not all Nate's offering: he's also come up with a way to use the new Web Clip feature from 1.1.3 to support something that many an iPhone user has been asking for: speed dial icons on the Home screen.
In order to do this, you'll either need some technical savvy or you'll have to put a bit of trust in Nate: basically the hack works by writing a script on a web server that takes a phone number in the URL and then tries to initiate a call with it. You can turn that page into a Web Clip; voilà, you've got an icon on your Home screen that will call a specified number. The only catch is that because of the iPhone's built-in security features, you'll be asked to confirm that you want to call the number, which may or may not make it faster than using the double-tap Home button method introduced in 1.1.1.
Maybe you can't play Halo on your iPhone, but that doesn't mean that they don't go together like modernist art and utter confusion. Kato, over at WITFITS has revved up an iPhone-specific way to view your Halo 3 stats online. Just pop ihalostats.com into Safari and enter the gamertag you want to view.
iHaloStats lets you view your basic statistics, game history, achievements, even your screenshots, all in an easy-to-use iPhone-targeted interface. While you can use the site through other browsers, the developer says it doesn't work nearly as well with Firefox or IE (you can, of course, always use the official Bungie.net site on those instead).
Anyway, I just looked up my own gamertag in iHaloStats and was shocked—shocked—to find that I haven't played Halo 3 for over a month. What the heck have I been doing with myself? Excuse me while I go take care of some business.
[hat tip: Veronica Belmont via twitter]
Thanks to the iPhone's new self-location feature, the Zen amongst us can finally find ourselves—or a radius of where we're likely to be. But your results may vary depending on the data available for your area. If you're relying on cellphone location, it's only really handy if you've, say, been dumped out of the trunk of a 1994 Lincoln Continental and have no idea what state you're in. To give a completely hypothetical example. Otherwise, it's somewhat lacking (I'm in Boston? Thanks, iPhone!).
The Wi-Fi location information provided by Skyhook Wireless is definitely more useful—if your area is mapped in their database. Fortunately, unlike with the cellphone locating, you can do something about the Wi-Fi mapping. Reader Robert wrote in to tell us about his experience with contacting Skyhook on how to add his own Wi-Fi access point to their database. Interested in doing the same? Find the instructions, straight from the horse's mouth, after the jump.
Continue reading "Put yourself on the map with Skyhook for better iPhone location"
Last week's 1.1.3 software update to the iPhone brought a bunch of new features, which we painstakingly detailed over at the Mothership with a careful detail usually reserved for Talmudic study. But even under the magnifying lens of our scrutiny, one or two minor changes escaped our notice. Fortunately, the folks over at iPhone Atlas were sharp enough to pick up on them.
The limit on stored SMS messages has been raised from 1,000 to an ice-cream-headache-inducing 75,000. That's right: now you can store every SMS message that you send in your entire lifetime—unless you are a teenage girl, in which case you'll still need to erase all of your conversations every month.
And now you can use two fingers while typing, too. "Huh?" you say. "Couldn't you already do that?" Well, yes, but now you can use two fingers simultaneously. Previously, tapping any key meant that the rest of the keyboard was rendered inoperable, which helped eliminating extraneous contact from your other hand. That apparently wasn't as big a deal as Apple initially thought, so now you can use your left thumb to hold down the shift key while typing a letter: you'll get a capital and the keyboard will immediately snap back into lower case mode. Handy for those used to, oh, almost every other keyboard ever made.
A final addendum on 1.1.3. Macworld head honcho Jason Snell was trying out 1.1.3's new "Manually manage your music and video" feature; he gives it a thumbs down. While it does let you drag-and-drop music and video files onto your iPhone, the major advantage that the feature brought tot he iPod—letting you transfer music and video from multiple computers to one iPod—has been locked down on the iPhone. Try to manually manage an iPhone on a second computer and it'll work—after iTunes offers to erase any files currently on the iPhone. So those hoping to sync with multiple computers are still forced to engage in interpretive dance and ritual sacrifice.
No, I'm afraid that the long-awaited iMullet is still just a dream, but to those iPhone users who've been waiting since launch for a chance to use their business account with the handset of their dreams, that time is now. At long last, AT&T has made corporate plans available for the iPhone.
If you're an existing corporate customer, you'll need to renew your contract for two years and add an Enterprise Data Plan onto your iPhone-eligible voice service (replacing your current data plan): all include Visual Voicemail and unlimited data, but the $45/month plan includes 200 SMS messages, the $55/month has 1500 SMS messages, and the $65/month one features unlimited text messaging. New customers need to sign up for a two year contract of an iPhone-compatible voice plan and an Enterprise Data Plan.
And, if you're a frequent international traveler, you can also add on one of the previously mentioned Global Data Plans for an additional $25/month or $60/month, giving you 20MB and 50MB of international* data usage per month and thus, hopefully, preventing incredibly long and expensive data bills.
* Where international = these 29 countries.
[via Gizmodo]
