flop ya mac out

Waaaah! My Voicemail button does nothing!

Of course I wasn’t expecting Visual Voicemail to magically work in Australia, but surely hitting the button would just call my normal Voicemail, no?

Thanks to the chaps over at hackint0sh, now it can! And the best news is that you don’t even need to enter the firmware (those who have restored to factory default for reasons of stability like me, breath a sigh of relief)!

Punch this into your ‘last century’ dialer:

*5005*86*xxx# (where xxx is your Voicemail number).

So, on Virgin (cough) that is *5005*86*212# and viola! Hello Voicemail!

Think of all the taps hackint0sh just saved us! Now we don’t have to put Voicemail in our favourites.

Handily, accessing Voicemail this way automatically enables the in-call keypad. Hats off to you, Apple!

Now, if only I could figure out why I’m not receiving the new Voicemail notifications from Virgin? All other SMS’s come through fine, so surely I don’t have to mess around with this, do I?

So as you heard, I unlocked my iPhone and everything was working well, complete with total strangers stopping me in the street to bask and my newfound manhood. Fine. Whatever.

I’d been enjoying the splendours of AppTapp’s additional home screen icons (particularly VNotes, a superb voice recorder as part of AppTapp) when I started to notice that a few things weren’t quite right about the place…

Animations suddenly were skipping frames and super sluggish in parts! (Particularly when unlocking the phone).

I tried numerous tests to see what was causing it: it wasn’t that there wasn a lack of free space, because when I removed all my songs - it still underperformed.

It wasn’t converting the Address Book Language file to ASCII in a bid to change the number format, because putting the binary version back on made no difference!

Reverting the You Tube hack didn’t bring me any joy either.

Something must have cocked up somewhere… but what to do?

Well, being a fairly anal-retentive guy, I can’t stand something running at only 95%, so the choice was to just restore the thing with iTunes.

I was planning on putting YouTube back on after the restore, but when it occured to me that in order to do that, I’d basically have to reinstall all the mods which might put me back to square one minus some hours, so I decided I could live without YouTube and Australian-formatted phone number mods.

I’d read that flashing the modem to unlock the SIM was restore-resistant for 1.01 and 1.02 firmwares, so off I toddled to restore town!

Everything worked dandily, the SIM unlock remained, I just had to use iNdependence to ‘activate’ the phone and we were good to role, complete with sexy smooth animations once more.

EDIT: The joy was short lived, only a day later all the animation slowed down again, however, I ended up solving the problem for good here, by replacing the YES WHATEVER OPTUS carrier logo from the menu bar.