iPhone - page 417

No need to resort to physical violence to escape from jail, just let an engrossing iPhone game do the work for you.  GamePron brings us of this tale of a gaming fix with a higher cost than usual:

Everybody knows that there’s a certain risk one takes when playing addictive, engrossing games when you’re meant to be doing something else.  The prevalence of awesome games on the iPhone hasn’t helped that risk – as a Philippines police officer has learned.

Five inmates recently escaped from a police precinct in Cagayan de Oro City, snatching up the officer’s keys where he’d left them while playing a quick few levels of Plants vs. Zombies.   Apparently, the convicts had no trouble getting the keys and gaining their freedom – although four of the five were recaptured shortly after.

A cautionary tale for those playing addictive games on the clock – though I suspect one (likely) former prison guard now has a lot more time to work on his high score!

[via SlashDot]

I love my iPhone photography apps, and I thought I knew about all the best ones. Turns out there’s always something new to learn.

Heather Powazek Champ posted a list of her favorite iPhone photography apps, and among them was one that was totally new to me: Diptic.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83eXWu9_BRs&feature=player_embedded#!

The most obvious reason not to perform a death grip on your iPhone is to prevent it from dropping your signal, but as the above video by Israeli software company Tawkon shows, there’s also a more invisible and dastardly effect: the death grip also causes your iPhone 4 to pump more radio frequency radiation into your brainpan.

It makes sense: when your iPhone 4 senses that it’s losing its connection to the nearest cell tower, it increases its radio frequency output to try to get a better signal. That’s true for all smartphones. It’s just how cell phones work.

As for whether or not you have anything to worry about by that radiation increase, no one knows the long term health effects of cellphone use, but me and Herb — the sentient, Kuato-esque goiter growing out of my left temple — say hell no. You cell phone hypochondriacs in the audience might want to start bumpering your head in tin foil anyway.

The death of reformed cad and marginally inept Mac writer John Brownlee was predicated by what seemed to him, at the time, to be the most innocuous sally into pre-dinner small talk.

“I heard today, baby, that OK Cupid says that iPhone users have twice as much sex as Android owners. Isn’t that interesting?”

Brownlee only realized his mistake as the first of many skull-crushing blows rained down upon his head, but by then it was too late to identify himself as a statistical anomaly: all 4.3-inches of his girlfriend’s discarded Droid X had already been deftly crammed past his uvula while she screamed, “Never again, you bounder, I said never again!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsNXtEayCSY

It’s every child’s worst fear – teaching their parents how to use technology!  Perhaps it’s payback for adolescence.  SuperNews! offer up this hilarious look at what happens when Dad gets an iPhone.

“Don’t turn it on! You’ll waste the batteries!”

Be sure to also check out their epic battles Gates vs. Jobs and Gates vs. Jobs II.

Phone Disk, from Macroplant, is a utility for Mac OS X (and Windows) that runs quietly in the background on your computer until you plug-in an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad using a USB sync cable. Plugging in your favorite iDevice causes Phone Disk to seamlessly mount the iOS file system on that device to your computers file system. Once mounted you can directly access the files on that device using Finder (and Windows explorer) or any other program.

You’ll be interested in this application if you’re an IT Ninja looking for another good troubleshooting utility to carry around or you’re simply curious about the data that resides on your favorite iDevice.

Pictures of a white iPhone 4 in the wild have been leaked out of China.

The white iPhone 4 was apparently sneaked out of the factory inside the box for a black iPhone 4 and taken to Hong Kong.

The white iPhone 4 has suffered several delays, and is due to ship “later this year,” according to a curt statement from Apple. The device was originally supposed to ship in with the black iPhone 4, but has pushed back twice for reasons unknown. There has been speculation that the white iPhone leaks light from its LCD.

The pictures below who a 32GB model and include details like the headphone jack connector and dock connector.

UPDATE: This might be a fake, as noted by our friends over at 9to5Mac. Vendors in Hong Kong, for example, can turn a black iPhone 4 into a white iPhone 4 for about $360. The lack of a silver metal ring around the camera flash is the give-away.

Thanks Chris of MICGadget.

Wish Jonny Ive’s aesthetic sense was more like an old flea-market VCR? A mere $25 will get you one of Karvt’s wood-panel iPhone 4 skins, coming in flavors of dead tree flesh ranging from bamboo to cherry and from walnut to pine.

Now if only someone would just come up with a musty orange shag bumper and my iPhone 4 would be the spitting image of my creepier grandma’s basement.

Inundated with a deluge of iPhone 4 jailbreaks at their retail locations, Apple has finally locked down access to JailbreakMe from inside the Apple Store. If you try to go to jailbreakme.com from within an Apple Store now, a DNS forward will just route you back to Apple.com.

Good move, Apple… but what’s taken so long? JailbreakMe.com has been around since 2007, and even back then offered an instant jailbreak to anyone visiting the site in Mobile Safari running iOS 1.1.1. You’d think they would have shut jailbreakme.com access off at their retail stores three years ago.

Independent app developer Tim Sears has just released his latest creation for iPhone, and if you are a Foursquare user, this is one for you.

Future Checkin utilizes the new background location features available with iOS 4 and allows you to check-in to your favorite, recent or nearby venues without even getting your phone out of your pocket.

What good is an iPhone if you can’t run a tricorder on it?  Hiding out in the app store is this little gem called Tricorder TR-580, with realistic sound effects and a hidden trove of data.  Somewhat of a cross-series hybrid, it’s not an official Star Trek studio release but definitely worth 99 cents.

You can track crewmates in the field too. Makes a good companion to the iPhone Communicator app!

Like we mentioned a few weeks ago, we’re pretty excited about the potential for the iPhone morphing into all kinds of contraptions through hooking up with a little extra hardware. New Potato is one of the lead outfits in this area, and they’ve just introduced a kit that turns the iPhone into a bike super-computer. Rad.

The $99 kit contains a rather large cadence/speed sensor, ruggedized rubber iPhone mount, mounting hardware and a dongle that the iPhone uses to communicate with the sensor; combine the  kit with the free LiveRider app, and presto — a cycling computer with all the standard functions (speed along with max and average, time, distance, cadence, pace) and more advanced functions like competing against a chase bike, ride map and speed graph.

Being the bike geeks we are here at the Cult, we’ve already started playing around with a test unit and we’ll have a full report up soon. Can’t wait? LiveRider is available from retailer J&R or directly from New Potato.

Earlier today, Apple released another update to the iOS 4 beta and the corresponding SDK to developers, bringing the current version of both to 4.1 beta 3. The update follows the release of the previous beta by less than a week.

There are a plethora of problems being reported about the iPhone 4 and iOS 4 and I hope that this update will address them. I’d particularly like to see fixes for the following:

• Proximity sensor
• Bluetooth connectivity
• Bluetooth muffled audio
• iPhone 4 yellow tinged photos (rear facing camera)
• Slow performance issues on the iPhone 3G

Registered iOS developers can grab a copy of the new beta at developer.apple.com/iphone.

I have not yet heard about any new features in this beta, but these details will likely surface soon. We’ve seen reports that the proximity sensor issue may have been resolved by Beta 2, however in my opinion that is still an open issue due to conflicting reports about it. Additionally, I suspect that these beta releases resolve the PDF security flaw in Mobile Safari since the hack doesn’t support iOS 4.1. Finally, the rapid release of beta 3 almost immediately after beta 2 indicates that Apple maybe getting closer to a public release of iOS 4.1.

If you find out anything new about this update feel free to tell us all about it in the comments.

Take a quick visit to JailbreakMe, let Comex benevolently exploit a huge security hole in iOS’ native PDF rendering, then install the $4 My3G program through Cydia and you can have FaceTime running flawlessly on your iPhone 4 even without a WiFi connection. But how much is that FaceTime call going to drain from your monthly data allowance?

9to5Mac has done the tests, and it’s actually not as bad as you might fear: in fact, the average FaceTime call only uses about three megabytes of data per minute.

They conducted their test using “lots of movement” so that the FaceTime compression algorithm was kept on its toes, and a five minute FaceTime call ended up slurping up 14.7MB of data. That’s pretty modest usage against a 2GB cap. Clearly, the prohibition against 3G FaceTime isn’t in consideration of iPhone 4 users’ wallets, then… but AT&T’s own congested 3G network.

Showing how easy it is to jailbreak the iPhone 4 by simply visiting the jailbreakme.com website, an anonymous prankster jailbroke all the display phones at one of Apple’s stores.

It’s not clear what store was targeted; nor how many iPhone 4s the mischief-maker was able to jailbreak. The only evidence is a picture posted to an online photo-sharing site and a comment submitted to Reddit: “I got bored, so I jailbroke apple store iPhone 4’s.”

Note: If you have an iPhone or iPad, be careful which websites you visit in Mobile Safari. There’s a huge security hole that allows the browser’s PDF viewer to execute code, bypassing all security mechanisms. It’s being used to jailbreak devices, but could easily be used by bad guys to install some very nasty, malicious software. Expect an emergency 4.0.2 iOS update from Apple very soon.
Via Reddit.

The iPhone 4 jailbreak is one of the easiest ever. You just visit the jailbreakme.com webpage in Mobile Safari, swipe the “Slide to Jailbreak” slider, and it installs the unofficial App Store Cydia on your device.

But it comes at a price. The jailbreak exploits a wide-open security hole that could easily be exploited by malicious hackers. Malicious sites that install malware could exploit the largely unkown, unpatched security hole.

Note: The security hole in Mobile Safari is not caused by jailbreaking the device. It is already there on all iOS devices, jailbroken or not.

Apple is sure to investigate the exploit and quickly issue an update. But in the meantime, here’s a quick patch you can install yourself:

Say goodbye to that wedge of magnetized plastic in your wallet. If AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile have their way, the future of credit is your smartphone… and they are going to war against the likes of Visa and Mastercard to accomplish it.

According to Bloomberg, the three carriers are working with Discover and Barclays, testing a system in four US cities that would enable special smartphones embedded with NFC (near field communication) chips to make credit card payments with just a wave of the hand.

Making a credit card payment from your iPhone isn’t exactly a new idea: Visa already lets you do this with special payWave cases, and Digg founder Kevin Rose is backing Square, which is a similar idea.

The point here, though, is that it’s the carriers who are making the most concerted push yet to consolidate and bring ubiquity to smartphone payment systems, by cutting out the biggest credit giants entirely.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf1ACPTkmr0

If you can get it to load, Jailbreak Me is the one of the simplest jailbreak solutions yet. Just visit the site on Mobile Safari and — if you can get it to load — your iOS device running 4.0 or 4.0.1 is jailbroken, no reboot required.

Unfortunately, when it was released yesterday, there were caveats: FaceTime and MMS got knocked out of commission with the jailbreak.

Luckily, Jailbreakme.com has now been updated with a fix to the FaceTime and MMS issues. Already jailbroken? Just open Cydia and upgrade when you’re prompted to.

Finally, here’s the best news: if you’re waiting for a compatible unlock, it should be available in the next 48 hours.

If you’re a BlackBerry warrior who does business in the futuristic desert city of Dubai, it’s about time to consider switching to an iPhone: the telecommunications authority in the United Arab Emirates will be blocking some BlackBerry services come October.

The issue is one of government surveillance. BlackBerries send encrypted data to oversea servers through their own messaging layer, which means that local authorities can’t read that data. The iPhone doesn’t handle messaging, e-mail and the web in the same fashion, making it exempt from the UAE’s criticisms.

Research in Motion has garnered official criticism due to its encryption scheme before. India also threatened to ban Blackberries at a certain point, prompting RIM to ultimately cave on their position. That’s less likely to happen in the UAE: it’s the difference between a potential subscriber base of a billion and a hundred million.

You can view this story in one of two ways as an iPhone owner. On the one hand, if you go to the UAE with your iPhone, the government at least wants the option of snooping on you. On the other hand, at least you can use its full array of services while you’re there… an option that now appears to be completely off the table for BlackBerry owners.

Ruh roh! It looks like Apple has an excuse to shutter all the front facing cameras on every iPhone 4 sold after last week. Apple’s notorious grip on it’s no porn in iOS apps policy won’t protect anyone from the adult entertainment industries interest in making tons of money with the iPhone 4’s FaceTime video chat feature.

Last week the U.S. government surprised everyone by announcing that jailbreaking, root access, and carrier unlocking was a legal option for buyers of smartphones that want to access apps not sold by the manufacturer or to free the handset for use on the network of their choice.

After this decision it is likely that more people will be jailbreaking their iPhones, iPads, or iPod touches. There are over 100 million iOS devices in circulation and it is thought that a mere fraction of these are jailbroken.

Jailbreaking isn’t necessarily an easy thing to do, but there are many how-to’s (including our own below) that will explain to you how to do it. The problem with that is that you need to find the right one to fit your iOS device. That isn’t easy with the plethora of iOS versions and different iOS device models out there until now.

The Jailbreak Matrix solves that problem. The Matrix is a chart that will show you the details you need to jailbreak your specific iOS device and its version of iOS. It will even tell if you if a jailbreak doesn’t exist, provide download links for firmware and iTunes, and versioning information for firmware and baseband (if appropriate). The information provide is likely to help you to prevent bricking your device.

You can view the  Jailbreak Matrix and find the jailbreaking how-to suitable for your circumstances or you can check out Culf of Mac’s Jailbreak Superguide. Regardless of the option you choose you can jailbreak most iOS devices in no time at all.

Is your iOS device jailbroken or unlocked? What circumstances drove you to wanting to do that in the first place? Tell us all about it in the comments.

iOS hackers have released jailbreakme.com, a browser-based jailbreak utility for the Apple iPhone 4, 3GS, and 3G when running iOS 4 or 4.0.1. The jailbreak is reminiscent of one of the original jailbreaks for the original iPhone.

In addition to the above devices the jailbreak is compatible with an iPad running iOS 3.2 and 3.2.1 and an iPod touch 3G running iOS 4.0.

To celebrate their 3rd anniversary, Readdle have started a 48-hour sale from today which sees all of their iOS applications reduced to just $0.99. In addition to this massive sale, Readdle are also giving away an iPad to 3 lucky winners who retweet their anniversary message on Twitter.

To be in with a chance of winning, just follow these 3 simple steps:

For more information, visit the Readdle 3 years anniversary page. To get your hands on one of Readdle’s great applications, check out their App Store page.

We’d like to ask our Canadian readers for help with a story we’re working on about the iPhone 4.

The iPhone 4 just launched in Canada on Friday, and Canadian buyers are able to buy the device unlocked (if it’s bought from Apple rather than a carrier).

We’re looking for readers who are getting an unlocked iPhone 4 and can test it on Wind Mobile’s network to see if it can support 3G data speeds.

Why do we want to test the iPhone 4 on Wind Mobile’s network?

Wind Mobile is an up-and-coming carrier that uses the same GSM network technology as T-Mobile in the United States.

The iPhone is rumored to be coming to T-Mobile USA in the fall, breaking Apple’s exclusive deal with AT&T. However, it’s not clear whether the iPhone 4 has the right radio hardware to support T-Mobile’s 3G data network.

We’re told Wind Mobile in Canada has the same network infrastructure. If it works on Wind Mobile’s network, it should work on T-Mobile’s.

T-Mobile’s 3G data network operates on the 1700/2100 MHz bands. According to Apple’s specs, the iPhone 4 works on the 2100 UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA band, but not the 1700 band, which has led some to conclude that it is incompatible with T-Mobile’s 3G network.

However, there is some debate whether Apple simply didn’t list the 1700 band, which seems to be the convention when listing such specs. And no one has yet tested the iPhone 4 on T-Mobile’s network in the U.S. Despite the efforts of the Dev Team, there isn’t yet a publicly available unlock for the iPhone 4.

This is why we’d like help testing an unlocked iPhone 4 on Wind Mobile in Canada.

If you can help out, please email us at news (AT) cultofmac.com. In return, we’ll send you some goodies in the mail.

UPDATE: In the comments below, reader @Qorax tried a Wind Mobile SIM in a brand new, unlocked iPhone 4 he purchased over the weekend. Unfortunately, the SIM card didn’t work at all: no voice or data. We would have predicted he would have at least got voice. iPhone users here in the U.S. who unlock their phones and use T-Mobile SIM cards get voice and data — but Edge only.

But now that the iPhone 4 has been unlocked here in the U.S., we’re on the lookout for reports of usage on T-Mobile US’s network.

PS: @Qorax’s comment is worth reading to see how he beat the gigantic line for the iPhone 4 at his local Apple Store. Tricky!

MacWorld’s latest cover isn’t really special in that it features an iPhone 4 recursively shot by photographer Peter Belanger on another iPhone 4. Although that wouldn’t have been possible on previous iPhones due to resolution issues, lighting’s ultimately the most important aspect of professional photography, not megapixels or the lens. In ideal lighting conditions, getting a professional level shot from pretty any digicam isn’t all tha hard.

What I find more intriguing is that Belanger also did all of the post-photographic processing on the iPhone 4. Specifically, he used the $3 PhotoForge app to remove a green cast from the resulting image, and the $1 Resize-Photo to boost the DPI for publishing. That’s a little bit of a fudge, but all is forgiven: the resulting cover looks great.