flop ya mac out

Not just a pithy face? I mean, pretty?

I got an email from Scott Bourne! ‘Cause i had a go at him about something i thought he said on his podcast. He wrote back with an equal amount of un-pithyness, but alas – i hate to be wrong – and this time i was.

Time to write an apology! Hmm.

“I’ll never be negative! I’ll never be negative! I’ll never be negative!..” My new mantra.

But I blame the internet. And poptarts. They tasted sorta good? But really, they just burnt my tongue and tasted sorta bad…

Amidst all the iPhone kafuffle taking place in Europe last week, it looks like us Aussies might also have something to celebrate!

Just this week we were privy to a leak that the iPhone is not only going to use 3G in Australia but is in fact already being tested on a Virgin Mobile’s 3G network.

Word so far is that the device is performing “very nicely.”

In Australia, Virgin are a virtual network roaming on Optus. Unfortunately for Australians, Optus doesn’t have half as much reception as the national carrier, Telstra, but can we really see Telstra sharing revenue? (no).

As expected, Apple are pushing for Visual Voicemail “like there’s no tomorrow,” and also of interest, Virgin testers are concerned about the security of the new device, with worries that hackers might reprogram the phone’s modem to circumvent bandwidth restrictions.

It is expected that a new firmware update from Apple will bolster the modem’s security and ease concerns at Virgin well before any such launch of the iPhone in Australia.

At the iPhone’s Europe launch, Steve Jobs called 3G handsets “power hogs” in a bid to justify the continued use of edge, though he initially hinted at a 3G version when first launched. Could this now just be a bid to throw people off the scent?

Using Virgin Mobile certainly adds up: A groovy new company for a hip new piece of technology. Though, given the nature of negotiations in both the U.S. and Europe, anything is fair game, and Apple may merely be putting out the feelers ahead of a 2008 launch.

What does seem promising is that the revision will a least do away the slower EDGE technology. Especially seeing 3G reigns supreme in Australia.

It is expected that the phone’s Australian launch will most likely coincide with a worldwide release of the 3G, 2nd-gen iPhone in 2008, no doubt in a bid to prevent a frenzy of Australian phones being unlocked and flogged overseas. (Imagine! Finally the Australians can get a chance to make some money back on eBay with this thing!)

Virgin’s current data packs (3ooMB for AU$10/month) are already the industry best in Australia, making them the obvious choice for Australian iPhone Hackers Anonymous.

So as you know, I ran into strife when I first SIM unlocked my iPhone, and OS animations gradually became jerky.

After restoring the firmware (not by choice) and activating using iNdependence without installing anything remotely 3rd party, everything was as smooth as a baby’s bottom once more.

That was until just recently when the whole jerky thing started all over again! Aahh!

I wasn’t about to do another restore (and loose all my precious saved Google Map data? Ha!), so I started looking for what else could be causing the problem.

I’d already removed all my songs last time without success, after reading that someone thought this caused the thing to slow down. So I turned my attention to the Safari cache!

Voila! After a good Safari colonoscopy and a restart, everything was cool once again!

I’m not sure whether this was exactly what was to blame, but right now there’s not a lot else to put the performance lag and then sudden improvement down to… Hmm!

EDIT: Crapola! After some light use it’s back to it’s usual sluggish behaviour.

EDIT 2: I finally managed to fix it for good here. Solution: Removing the YES OPTUS carrier logo.

I find Safari’s cache not-so-hot.

I press the back button and it insists on reloading the majority of the page I was on just moments ago.

But the Google Maps cache! Now there’s a cache you can hang your hat on!

When I’m at home on wifi, I can cruise all over town, downloading maps and satelite images from all sorts of exotic locations, then head out into the field and pull up those same maps without having to reload a thing over slow old EDGE! Lovely!

It’s great if you’re heading to meet friends and want some ‘pre-loaded sexy’ to show them on the run!

Though, lately, I’ve been finding myself religiously directing the Maps app to the house of whoever I’m about to meet up with, just in case the opportunity comes up…

Hmm. Maybe there could be some hack that can load all detail levels of all maps from a specified area onto the phone’s cache…

Or I could just stop being a freak. Either way!

Ok great. When Apple start making statements, forshadowing some kind of iPhone Jonestown, I throw up in my mouth just a little bit.

The low-down is thus: when SIM-unlocked iPhones shake hands with soon-to-released iPhone firmware 1.1.1 (one sixth of the sign of the devil, you might add), it puts your sexy new friend into a state that Apple are terming “permanently inoperable.”

Of course the statement is written in such a way that it is not Apple’s update that is bricking the phones, but rather the way in which the SIM unlocks have already “caused irreparable damage” to the phone’s software.

Rubbish!

Tell me AT&T didn’t put the hard word on Apple to bend over and relax!

With the SIM unlock software being freeware, there was now no way for a desperate AT&T to grab back lost profits or follow through with legal action. A software update is the only opportunity that AT&T has to get back their iPhone exclusivity deal, and you can bet they’re pushing hard for it. So hard that they want Apple to go to drastic measures to get their point accross.

What on earth has to change in the new firmware that is so drastic that it will actually kill an unlocked phone? Not just re-lock it. Kill it.

It doesn’t seem to be adding up.

I suspect this is a considered move by Apple, and the media release is just grooming the public for the ‘I told you so’ effect.

Dan’s new toy arrived just this arvo after a lengthy flight, and fortunately he got onto the rumour sites before the unlocking ones. So, he’ll be keeping you posted on efforts to successfuly SIM unlock v1.1.1 and how that all pans out.

Fortunately the issues are rumoured to only affect SIM unlocked iPhones, and he can at least scroll like butter through his music in the meantime.
Being the manly man that I am, I will keep my SIM-free iPhone away from all USB ports until further notice, waiting wimpishly to see what happens when everyone else with hacked iPhones updates to the new firmware.

Surely all these (however many thousands) of unlocked iPhones can’t just go toi-toi?

This morning my SIM-free iPhone did a funny thing.

I plugged it into iTunes for some syncing good times, when – boom – hello recovery mode!

Something went awry somewhere, but no matter. I simply dropped my re-downloaded 1.02 software into iTunes’ download dir (~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates), turned off wireless to stop it trying to re-download the damn package (over dial-up, I don’t even want to think about it!) and started a restore.

But you know what? iTunes refuses to restore your iPhone unless it can first have a word with its Cupertino cohorts. No network, no restore.

Fine. Whatever. So I let iTunes connect to the internet, check for an update, and once satisfied that there wasn’t one, it began restoring my iPhone to 1.02, which will maintain my current SIM software unlock.

But what if a new firmware had been available?

I would have had no choice but to upgrade, effectively doing all sorts of nasty things to my unlocked precious, in line with Steve’s recent ‘cat and mouse‘ comments. There is currently no way to choose a previous firmware to restore.

Imagine if new revisions of iTunes checked your configuration for authenticity whenever you synced, and if in doubt, force you into recovery mode!

I really don’t think it’s that far fetched.

‘Genuine’ owners would simply perform the upgrade and restore from a backup. Unlocked iPhone owners would be either forced to wait for another unlock solution (hopefully not another 2 months!) or simply not sync their iPhone out of fear of it being kindly popped into Recovery Mode by iTunes!

We cover this in more detail in Episode 4 of the podcast. Maybe someone can make us a special Home Screen button that changes colour depending on whether it’s safe to sync of not? Maybe someone can just make a way to restore the thing without using iTunes?

Tell ya what, I’m gonna be keeping an eager eye out for updates before I next drop mine into the dock!

EDIT: Turns out it just might be possible to restore to an earlier firmware through iTunes! Hold down ALT + the Restore button  to select your desired firmware version. If this doesn’t work, play around with the different functions keys. It’s different on Mac to PC, etc. The one shortcoming is that you can’t downgrade from 1.1.1, which is obviously a big bummer for SIM unlockers.

But why anyone would have encouraged you to blindly upgrade to 1.1.1 is beyond me. Unless of course… oh yes.

Hm. So as we know, iPhoto jumps out of the scrub whenever we attach our iPhones, to eagerly scoop the photos onto our mac. Very nice.

But the last few times I’ve done this, almost half of my horizontal photos were upside down!

We know that iPhone uses it’s motion sensor to orientate photos correctly without having to go through the strain of actually rotating the pixels on the device itself, but is there a ‘right’ up and a ‘wrong’ down?

I’ll have to play around with how I orientate things to see if I can get some sort of pattern happening. With the way that baby snaps at night, it’s not looking like a biggie anyhow!

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.

Dear Daniel,

Now look what’s happened: you’ve gone and bought an iPhone!

How am I supposed to appear as ‘the cool guy’ to our fans if you’re going to go and do something like that? Hm?

Don’t worry, I’ve already ordered the breast enlargement accessory for my iPhone off an eBay member called ‘motherjiggle.’ They should be in the country about the same time as your phone. So we’ll call it square. For now.

Fingers crossed Apple don’t make it flat chested again with a software update…

Love Jason.

Sent from my well-endowed iPhone.