flop ya mac out

Along with Jason, i too changed the scrolling carrier logo YES OPTUS.

Whilst he replaced his with “iPhone”, i went the slightly more ghetto approach to gain some street cred with all me homeboys and girls. And mum and dad. See below…

Happiness comes in many packages. Mine came in this one (pictured).

Apart from the lady handing me over the package being a fan of Star Gate, it looked like my birthday had come. And it may as well have been my birthday, given the sausage surpise that awaited me behind the gimicky wrapping paper.

Here’s how to make sure your first iPhone experience is one to remember.

Step one.
You get your box.

Step two.
Take a shower to wash away the sins of the day from being around Window’s machines.

Step three.
Wear somethin pretty. Maybe a splash of cologne. You didn’t pay all that money just to fumble around like a bogan. Gotta look sharp.

Step four.
Manicure fingernails for ultimate touch experience. Don’t want any blood drawn in the heat of the night.

Step five.
Dim the lights. Put on some sexy keynote action from January 2007, to get you in the mood.

Step six.
Open the fricken box and stop blogging about it!

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.

It’s done! Within a week of receiving his iPhone, Jason has finally unlocked it! When you live outside the US, this means the difference between a really expensive iPod touch, and an awesome working iPhone.

To unlock his iPhone for free, it all started here, thanks to the iPhone Dev Wiki. There are some other guides like this, but he found this one the easiest to understand.

In a nutshell: Use iNdependence (a much better, more refined alternative to iActivator), to jailbreak the phone with one click, pop SSI onto the baby and also activate it for use as an iPod and wi-fi ‘communicator’.

Then, install AppTapp onto your jailbroken iPhone to enable you to install SFTP (required to read/write to the file system) and a bunch of other sexy 3rd party apps. And when they say party, they mean party! AppTapp installs by itself if your iPhone from your Mac’s Finder, and then it’s just a matter of selecting the packs (SFTP in this instance) that you want to install. Very handy!

The Dev Wiki do a pretty good job of detailing the process, but essentially, once SFTP is installed you can connect to the iPhone’s filesystem by using an FTP client pointed to the phone’s IP address on your wireless network. How sneaky!

After all the fun of going through the above, Jase found this site which looks to be an even better way to happyness (1 tap to unlock!) and furthermore, the creator says ‘Don’t donate to me, pick a nice charity’!

He hasn’t yet tried it himself, but let us know in the comments if it works for you! Another set of instructions worth a geez are over at modmyiphone.com, which may help you out!

Then finally, to release the YouTube love, Jason successfully followed this guide to enable the YouTube button to work as intended. This handy converter combined with these instructions will also free you of American formatted phone numbers (not doing this can become a huge annoyance after a while)!

He is now the proud owner of a fully functioning iPhone after getting a plan with Virgin and adding a 300Mg per month data option for an extra AU$10.

Remember - we aren’t responsible for any of the content linked to on this blog, or what might happen because of it, so use this info at your own risk. Jason now just has to find a way to get rid of the “Yes Optus” that displays on the screen.

EDIT: ‘Yes Optus’ carrier logo is now off Jason’s iPhone, with an surprising performance gain to boot! How lovely!