My iPhone bores me.
Never thought I would say that. When I first got my hands on one, it was a delight. Neat web browsing, e-mail, and loads of nifty games to amuse me when I needed to be amused. And it served me well, until the iPad arrived. Then everything was possible in a larger scale, and lounging around with a big screen was always preferable to fiddling with a small screen.
The iPhone still serves when I am out and about; but all I use it for nowadays is web, mail and the argument-saving potential of the satnav and Google maps; and I could get all that on a cheaper Android phone. And on an Android phone I could create a wifi hot-spot and connect my iPad to the web in the middle of a field. But Apple doesn’t want me to do that.
The world of Apple mobile devices is a walled garden. You can only install the applications that Apple allows into their App store. The upside of this is that you know that the apps you download will work, and because this approach secures revenue for developers, there is a huge choice. The downside is that Apple may not want to let you do all the things you want to do. On balance, for me, the Apple walled garden was full of enough goodies to make me happy and I had no need to knock down the wall. Until I really wanted to increase the usefulness of my phone and turn it into a wifi hot-spot.
Cracking open an Apple device to make it available for applications outside of the Apple store is known as jailbreaking. I had jailbroken (probably not a word) my first iPhone and it was something of a challenge. You had to get your hands on the latest Apple firmware, download a cracking program, and then run it against the firmware package. This produced a revised firmware file, and all you had to do then was get it into your iPhone. Then came the clever bit; you had to put your phone into DFU mode. DFU is Device Firmware Update, although it should really be Doesn’t Fucking Understand; because it was a real pain to put the iPhone into DFU mode. You had to press combinations of buttons at precise time intervals; and if you got the combination or timing wrong, then you had to start all over again. The whole process took at least an hour and it was invariably stressful. Furthermore. not that it worried me, there were concerns that it was not legal.
In the last week, the jailbreaking world has changed. Firstly, the FCC in America have declared that jailbreaking is legal; so there is now no likelihood of being extradited to Guantanamo Bay for cracking open your phone. Secondly, a very smart group of hackers has produced a wonderfully simple jailbreaking tool. Here are the instructions:
- Go to www.jailbreakme.com on your iPhone (Touch, Ipad)
Slide to jailbreak
Wait about 3 minutes while it works.
Done!
Of course literally millions of people want to use this, so during the last couple of days it has been difficult to get a response from their servers. But I finally managed it last night; and it worked immediately on she who must be obeyed’s phone this morning.
Then it was off to install MyWi, which is rather costly at $20, but means that my phone can now operate as a wifi hot-spot and I no longer have a need for a 3G iPad and a separate sim card.
Best of all is the opportunity for mischief. Walk into any establishment, change the hot-spot name to something appropriate, and then wait for customers to start asking to use it. I have this ready for the next time I am in Starbucks:
Comments 🔗
2010-08-04| Lloyd saysGotta agree that the maps and email is just about all that gives the iPhone its usefulness. It will be just as boring when hacked because the apps are little more than games or gimmicks and the repetitiveness soon becomes boring.
Cant think what sharing a low speed/bandwidth Edge/GPRS connection would be like but I imagine it would be equivilent to a 56k dial-up!
2010-08-04| Spike saysBetter than nothing, and faster than some of the crap wifi hot-spots around town.
2010-08-04| Billy saysMmmmm, fascinating, though I imagine it would have been easier to have bought the 3G version of the iPad in the first place :-)
2010-08-04| Spike saysEasier, but much more expensive; and therefore harder to justify the purchase of the revised version next year. Long term capex planning.
2010-08-04| Billy sayshaha … I bow to your strategic wisdom as always ..