iPhone - page 455

The iPhone Dev Team, the tireless hackers who provide software to jailbreak iPhones, know how to unlock the iPhone 3G S, but have decided to hold off releasing the software publicly pending Apple’s next move in the two year-old cat and mouse game between the company and the rogue user community.

“We can jailbreak the 3GS right now,” said a statement at the Dev-Team Blog, “but making our jailbreak public at this point … would in fact be detrimental to many more people than it would help. So we feel it’s best to keep our version of the jailbreak out of Apple’s sights for the time being.”

The crux of the problem seems to be a Dev Team concern that Apple will soon release an update to 3.0 software that will close the ultrasn0w exploit released last week that jailbreaks iPhone 3G running 3.0 software, and that many people who want to get an iPhone 3G S don’t have one yet.

“Once the [3G S] jailbreak is out, Apple will fix the iBoot-family bug we use to accomplish it,” the blog post explains. “[Apple] will simply stop signing the old iBoots and only sign the fixed ones. If you bought your phone after Apple has done this, there’s nothing you can do…the jailbreak isn’t going to work for you.”

For now the team has decided to work on 3.0 software issues such as push notification and will wait and see what Apple does next.

[The iPhone Blog]

After using the iPhone 3GS for a week, here’s five of my favorite, non-obvious tricks I’ve picked up.

A couple of weeks ago the Swedish site Dreamfeld.se posted a video showing the iPhone operating system running on a Mac Pro and a big multitouch screen.

The video was pretty impressive. It looked like the world’s biggest iPhone running on a 24-inch monitor. The video soon went viral on blogs, YouTube and Twitter. It’s been watched more than 300,000 times and is still being passed around.

But the whole thing is a fake; a viral video experiment to see how many hits could be generated.

How did they do it?

Phonesuit, makers of the excellent Mili PowerPack battery extender for iPhone and iPod Touch is set to leverage the video capability of iPhone 3G S and increasing interest in micro projectors with the Mili Pro, a new hand-held projector designed just for Apple mobile devices, coming in September 2009.

The Mili Pro is an iPhone / iPod compatible (all models), rechargeable, micro video projector with built-in speakers that will allow users to watch movies, video clips, podcasts and more in 640 x 480 resolution on screen surfaces up to 40 inches.

The projector will feature a variety of AV inputs, allowing users to feed AV directly through the standard dock connectors of iPhones and iPods, with two included RCA and VGA cables permitting connection directly to a laptop or PC, and to most standard AV equipment sources such as DVD players, VCR’s, etc. Users can switch between the various inputs at any time with the input source button.

The device will also ship with two removable. swappable battery packs providing up to 3 hours of uninterrupted projection power.

More hi-res pics after the jump

Apple has spoken on the issue of porno iPhone apps, and it’s, ‘No way Jose.’

An Apple spokesman says the company will not approve iPhone apps with “inappropriate” content, especially pornography, despite the iPhone 3.0 age restriction system.

The question of porno apps arose after Hottest Girls appeared on the iPhone app store — the first app to feature saucy photos of naked women. Promising “2200+ sexy bikini babes and lingerie models,” the app is decidedly softcore. (The app disappeared for a few hours on Thursday, apparently because Apple had pulled it, but the developer had removed Hottest Girls voluntarily because of the strain on the image servers.)

Thanks to age restrictions in the new iPhone 3.0 OS software, mature apps can be blocked from download from the App Store. Many observers expected the App Store to be flooded with pornographic apps, especially because mobile porn is turning into big business. Juniper Research estimates the mobile porn market to be worth $3.5 billion by 2010. Growth will come from streaming video and video chat. The biggest market will not be the U.S., but Western Europe, Juniper said.

But now Apple says categorically it will not approve porno apps now or in the future. In a statement received by Cult of Mac, spokesman Tom Neumayr said:

“Apple will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content, such as pornography. The developer of this application added inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed, and after the developer had subsequently been asked to remove some offensive content. This was a direct violation of the terms of the iPhone Developer Program. The application is no longer available on the App Store.”

What it is: Diorama is the first stereoscopic 3D game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Think the lovechild of Labyrinth and MC Escher.

Why it’s good: With standard red/cyan 3d glasses the depth illusion of the hologram is truly hard to believe and the application of Apple’s mobile OS accelerometer makes Diorama one of the coolest things we’ve seen on the platform.

The current version, which sells for 99¢, features Jaw-dropping holographic 3D graphics, Stereoscopic rendering at 30 frames per second, and super realistic 3d physics played across 9 challenging board environments.

Plus, if you don’t happen to have a pair of 3D glasses lying around, you can send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to

American Paper Optics
3080 Bartlett Corporate Drive
Bartlett, TN 38133

and they will send you some.

Even better, Diorama’s developers provide a link to instructions for DIY 3D glasses.

Where to get it: 99¢ at the iTunes App Store

This video doesn’t even come close to doing the actual game justice, but we provide it here because that’s just how we roll.

UPDATE 2: The app is available again from the App Store. Just checked at 4PM 6/25/09.

UPDATE: Apple hasn’t removed the app, the developer has, thanks to the strain on the saucy images server. “The server usage is extremely high because of the popularity of this app,” says the developer. “Thus, by not distributing the app, we can prevent our servers from crashing.” The app still works for those who have already bought it,  the developer says.

The first iPhone porn app has been removed from the iPhone App Store.

The softcore app, Hottest Girls, was downloadable for a few hours on Thursday, but is now unavailable. Neither Apple nor the developer were immediately available to provide an explanation, but it appears Apple changed its mind after the app received so much press attention on Thursday.

The $1.99 app for the iPhone and iPod touch featured 2,000 images of “topless, sexy babes and nude models,” according to reports.

Wired.com’s Charlie Sorrell, who downloaded the app before it was removed, said it was “terrible.”

“There is no slideshow to display a progressive striptease of the same model, so you are limited to one picture at a time before you have to navigate back to the main screen, which shows a lack of understanding as to how a porn app should work,” he wrote.

The brief approval of the app had many wondering if Apple was now willing to approve adult content on the App Store. The iPhone 3.0 OS includes age restrictions on applications.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qbWjaW25mQ

Just how badly most iPhone owners wanted video may be seen in the spike in YouTube upload traffic  — 400% since last Friday when the phone came out.

The surge, attributed to the iPhone 3GS, follows the general pattern of upload increase from mobile phones, some 1,700% in the last six months, YouTube noted in a press release:

“This growth represents three things coming together: new video-enabled phones on the market, improvements that make it easier to post a video to YouTube from your phone, and a new feature on YouTube that allows people’s videos to be quickly and effortlessly shared through social networks.”

iPhone 3GS uploads (most are tagged “testing the iPhone 3GS,” which is how we’re guessing they culled the numbers, since they didn’t specify) range from baby Kaylee at Grandma’s to kitchen table trials and one dropped into a pool above — with a fairly surprise ending…

The vids are pretty good, content aside, clear and not too shaky. Got something interesting?
Add your upload link in the comments…

Update: Yes, my Google Fu was off yesterday. Before you clue me in, I was aware of GarageBand as a solution (was before I wrote the story, but it requires iLife 08 or better) and internal iTunes editing (omits tools for ringtone characteristics like looping and delay). The free online solutions and free Mac solutions were not in evidence, buried under a whole lot of spam content and endless rehashes of the iTunes method. Googling “make iphone ringtones free” doesn’t bring up Rogue Amoeba’s excellent Make iPhone Ringtones app.

I still think it’s funny that this kind of work-around even exists and stand by the humor category, even if the iPhone knowledge is weak.

For two years now, Apple has had an incredibly dumb official system for handling ringtones on the iPhone. Rather than allowing you to just convert any song in your library into a ringer, Apple restricts you to only music purchased from the iTunes Store, and then charges 99 cents a song, at that.

Now, there is an elegant shareware solution to this problem, iPhone Ringtone Maker from Efiko, which costs $7.50 at the moment and can generate unlimited new tones for that initial purchase price. Which is nice, but what do you do if you just want one song in your library made into a ringer for life? Unfortunately, there is no free solution for Mac. Windows has iRinger, a serviceable (if ugly) app that does the trick for free.

And in the current era of virtualization, that suggests an incredibly kludgy solution in the making. Here’s a free (not-so-easy) 9-step process for turning any MP3 into an iPhone ringtone on your Mac. And yes, I actually did this, although I installed VirtualBox and Windows 7 for other reasons months ago, so I could at least leave that out.

1. Install VirtualBox from Sun on your computer.

2. Download and install the Release Candidate of Windows 7, following these directions.

3. Launch your Windows 7 environment in VB.

4. Direct a Windows web browser to the iRinger page, and download and install it.

5. From your Mac environment, e-mail the audio file you wish to convert to yourself.

6. Launch a webmail site in the Windows environment and download the song.

7. Import the song into iRinger, trim to just the portion you want, and export.

8. E-mail ringtone back to the Mac environment and import to iTunes.

9. Add it to your iPhone and select it.

And that’s it! Total time with downloads and installation…36 hours. Maybe you’re just better off spending $7.50, huh?

An intrepid software developer has published a thorough memoir that details many reasons why Apple is so far ahead of the field in the mobile applications game, and why Blackberry, Palm and Android will have a hard time catching up any time soon.

Marcus Watkins found himself developing an application for his mobile phone in much the same way that countless other developers undoubtedly realized their inspirations: he was minding his own business when he realized one day his life would improve if his phone could do something that, at the point of his epiphany, it couldn’t.

He did his research, found out there wasn’t an application to meet his needs, realized the size of the potential market for his app in the many millions of people with his phone – a good percentage of whom might find his application useful – and he went to work.

Unfortunately (perhaps) for Watkins, his phone is a Blackberry, but fortunately (for Blackberry users) he persevered, and his story shows just how far behind Apple the other smartphone makers are as the device category enters its third year in existence.

Kevin Miller has a great story about how he used the new “Find My iPhone” feature to track down his stolen iPhone and recover it from a thief.

In Chicago for a Lego convention, Kevin had his iPhone stolen in a bar. Luckily, he’d just activated the Find My iPhone feature. The following day, Kevin and a couple of his Lego-convention friends used the iPhone’s built-in GPS and Google Maps to track its location.

As they converged on the crook, he tried to make a run for it. I won’t ruin the rest of the story. It’s a great story, well told.

Help plant a tree to offset carbon emissions from your iPhone or iPod is the green idea behind AcornHq, a London-based company.

The brainchild of a couple of New Zealand transplants, John and Sarah Lewis, the company asks 20 Apple device owners to give $3.50 per device — iPhone or current and older iPods — to plant a tree to counteract the effects on the environment from manufacture and use.

Those oak trees take root on a New Zealand planting farm, where Lewis hopes Acorn donors willing to trek that far will be able to visit soon.

After the jump, details on how it works from John Lewis.

The Dev-Team, an iPhone hacking group, has released a free jailbreaking and unlocking tool for the iPhone 3.0 OS.

Called UltraSn0w, the easy to use unlocking tool jailbreaks the 3.0 iPhone to allow unauthorized apps and unlocks it for use with other carriers.

“Customers are voting and the iPhone is winning,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, in his first officially quoted statement for the company since taking a medical leave of absence in January.

Jobs’ comment came in the wake of a news release touting one million iPhone 3G S units sold in its first weekend since being released last Friday. “With over 50,000 applications available from Apple’s revolutionary App Store, iPhone momentum is stronger than ever,” continued Jobs in the release, which also noted that six million customers have downloaded the new iPhone 3.0 software since it was released last Wednesday.

The statement did not indicate whether or not Jobs would return to work at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, CA on Monday.

Apple issued $30 iTunes store credits over the weekend to some US customers whose iPhone 3G S models were not able to be activated for service with AT&T when the phones were released on Friday.

In an email sent to customers who had ordered the new smartphone through Apple’s online store prior to the official release, Apple apologized for delays “due to system issues and continued high activation volumes,” which the email said “could take us up to an additional 48 hours to complete.”

Customers were told to expect an email with the iTunes credit authorization on Monday and asked to accept the company’s “sincere apologies for the inconvenience this delay has caused.”

Some customers were particularly miffed last week after having received initial notice from UPS that their phones were scheduled for delivery on Wednesday, but saw deliveries rescheduled to Friday’s official release date, apparently at Apple’s behest.

There’s plenty of naysayers pooh poohing the iPhone 3G S. It’s a minor upgrade, they say. Not worth the money, especially for 3G owners.

But after buying one on Friday morning and playing with it all day, I can say with 100% certainty that that’s complete and utter rubbish.

The 3G S is a major step up from the iPhone 3G, worth every penny. Sell the car; sell the house; sell the kids: you must have this phone.

The full review after the jump, plus plenty of test photos and video shot in sunny San Francisco.

Apple may have contributed to iPhone 3G S activation delays Friday that have many device users hopping mad and may leave some customers without telephone service through the weekend.

An AppleInsider report during the day Friday indicated that Apple’s activation servers were under strain even greater than those Wednesday that made it difficult for some users to download and install the new 3.0 version of iPhone’s operating software.

Cult of Mac has learned that at least one customer, who pre-ordered a 3G S from the Apple website shortly after the device was announced on June 8, received a message from UPS on Monday this week saying that his order for the 3G S would be delivered on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, Apple sent him a message saying the courier had made a mistake. The UPS site Wednesday showed the delivery was delayed by request of the recipient, which, of course had not been the case. On Thursday, The ‘recipient request’ notice had been removed, though there was still no word on expected delivery.

It would appear from this user’s experience that Apple told UPS to delay iPhone 3G S shipments until Friday, the official release date.

Of course, it’s unclear whether early delivery of some customers’ phones would have affected the activation delays other users experienced Friday. iTunes gave many trying to activate their devices a message reading “Your activation requires additional time to complete. Due to the current activation volumes, it may take up to 48 hours to resolve your issue,” and many were quick to blame AT&T for the delay.

However it appears clear that Apple may have played a significant role — aside from being unprepared to meet activation demand through iTunes servers — in spoiling the launch of yet another of the company’s groundbreaking products.

AT&T used its Facebook page to quash rumors about an iPhone tethering plan Friday.

Apple fan site Appmodo quoted “a source with AT&T” Friday, saying iPhone tethering would cost users an $55 a month and be available sometime in July.

UPDATE: MMS and tethering are now scheduled for September, according to a report at Appmodo, and tethering will cost an additional $55 per month on top of iPhone data plans.

At this writing AT&T has not issued a statement confirming or denying the report and a call to ATT media relations was not returned. (Thanks, Jason)

An admin for the Facebook account made a status update saying, “There are a lot of reports out there, but wanted you guys to know that rumors of $55 tethering plan on top of an unlimited data plan are false,” says the AT&T statement. “We’ll have more news to share when the iPhone tethering option is closer to launch.”

Calls to AT&T were unreturned Friday afternoon, but Mark Siegel, AT&T executive director for media relations told Cult of Mac on Thursday the company would offer a tethering plan “in the future,” without giving details of pricing or a date certain.

iFixit CEO Kyle Weins flew to London Thursday to be one of the first people in line at Apple’s Regent Street store and picked up a spankin’ new iPhone 3G S for the sole purpose of tearing the mother down.

Once again, using only a heat gun or hair dryer, a Phillips #00 screwdriver, a small suction cup and a spudger, you too, could get into Apple’s latest smartphone/mobile computing device — if such was your idea of entertainment.

iFixit is widely regarded as the best teardown artists in the biz and this item certainly burnishes that reputation, with detailed notes and photos showing the engineering minutiae of what may become Apple’s most popular product ever.

Apple promises faster speed and longer battery life with the 3G S iPhone, but early notes on the teardown indicate a battery with only 6% more ‘oomph’ than the one in the 3G, using a battery with 1219mAh as opposed to 1150mAh in the 3G. The main Samsung CPU is capable of 833MHz, which appears to confirm Apple’s marketing that says the ‘S’ in the 3G S stands for ‘speed’.

See another excellent teardown and parts analysis from the fearless tech wizards at Rapid Repair, but remember the old adage: ‘don’t try this at home’ — unless you don’t care about voiding your warranty.

Not content to sit back and enjoy the many feature upgrades of iPhone 3.0’s official release, iPhone users worldwide exchanged various methods for enabling tethering on their phones Thursday, pulling an end-around on carriers who failed to have tethering plans in place for Wednesday’s release of the new firmware.

Even prior to the official release of the new operating software for Apple’s popular mobile devices Wednesday, 9 to 5 Mac had published detailed instructions for enabling tethering, which AT&T – iPhone’s exclusive carrier in the US – does not at present officially support.

In response to questions about tethering with iPhone 3.0, Mark Siegel, AT&T’s Executive Director of Media Relations told Cult of Mac Thursday “anything to do with the software and what it can or can’t do is an area that Apple needs to comment on.” He had no further comment from AT&T regarding tethering on the iPhone, other than to reiterate that “We will offer a tethering plan in the future but have not set a date at this time.”

Tethering is a process that allows two devices to share an internet connection over a carrier’s data network, seen in many cases as preferable to using insecure public WiFi connections. Carriers typically offer tethering plans that increase a customer’s monthly spend from between $15 and $30 per month for the access to extra data, which can be limited to 500MB on the low end of the price range, up to unlimited extra data at the high end.

AT&T at present already charges iPhone customers $30 per month over and above the cost of a calling plan for “unlimited data,” which many believe is exorbitant in the light of how much data a user typically accesses with normal browsing and emailing on the phone.

Be sure to let us know in comments below if you’ve downloaded the config files necessary to enable tethering on your phone, whether tethering is an important option for you to have, and what you’d be willing to pay to have it legitimately.

Apple finally made the iPhone 3.0 firmware update available to US customers Wednesday afternoon and anecdotal reports indicate the company’s servers are working hard to meet the demand.

A few readers indicated problems with their downloads timing-out in the comment thread on our review of the software, other readers in a thread at MacRumors indicated painfully slow download speeds for the 230MB file — though some also indicated lightning quick experiences as fast as one minute to download.

I happened to be caught out and about this afternoon and found even getting to the iTunes app store was problematic over a public WiFi connection. Before attempting to fetch iPhone 3.0 I tried downloading a free iTunes U Summer Mix of music, which I gave up on after 3 ‘network connection re-set’ error messages and figured trying to update my iPhone would be fruitless.

How about you? Are you running the software now? Any problems with the download? Let us know in comments below.

AT&T announced limited changes to its general upgrade policy Wednesday, extending ‘eligibility’ for subsidized pricing on the new iPhone 3G S to some current customers who signed service contracts on the 3G model less than one year ago.

The changes come in response to the great number of complaints that arose after the company announced subsidized pricing on the new iPhone ($199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB) would only be extended to new customers signing a two year service commitment and to current customers who are ‘eligible’ for a hardware upgrade when they want to purchase a new 3G S model.

The standard upgrade policy has always been vague, with AT&T allowing only that “In general, the more a customer spends with us, the quicker they become eligible for a price break on a new device.”

The announcement released Wednesday stated “iPhone customers who spend more than $99 a month per line with us generally are eligible for an upgrade between 12 and 18 months into their contract,” which is vague enough, but the company will offer, beginning Thursday June 18, subsidized pricing on new iPhone 3G S phones to “customers who are upgrade eligible in July, August or September 2009.”

Further confusing the issue, AT&T offers “early” upgrade pricing of $299 (16GB) and $399 (32GB) for the 3G S model to customers who qualify. The company has an upgrade eligibility wizard on its site that tells current customers when they are eligible to different hardware options based on its secret algorithm weighing length of AT&T contract, how much money a customer spends per month, possibly one’s credit score, etc.

[Silicon Alley Insider]

It may take Microsoft three tries to get things right, but the same is also sometimes true of Apple.

The iPhone 3.0 OS — a free update available on Wednesday for all iPhone owners — is a good example. Finally the iPhone has several must-have features it previously lacked, especially tethering, making the 3.0 software an essential upgrade.

But the real pleasure is in the details. The 3.0 software includes a bunch of tweaks and small improvements that makes the iPhone experience extremely slick and polished. It seems silly, but I got as big a kick out of UI tweaks in the iPod interface as show-stoppers like cut-and-paste.

Still, overall, the iPhone 3.0 OS turns the iPhone from a nifty gadget into a real computing device. The iPhone is now truly a pocket Mac for the twenty-first century.

The Apple blogosphere percolated with spitting and popping yesterday after Daring Fireball reported that iPhone and iPod Touch users might find reasons to be excited about the impending release of QuickTime X in Snow Leopard.

The possibility of native .flv file support in QuickTime X meant that support for Flash video – probably the biggest item remaining on many people’s wish-list for iPhone – could soon be a reality for Apple’s mobile device users. The story was picked up by TechCrunch and we were off to the races.

Turns out to have been a false alarm, triggered by an over-eager post at Cateto blog, occasioned by a bit of software confusion, but still…

The point here is that with Perian, a free open source plug-in for QuickTime, Flash on the iPhone and iPod Touch would be conceivable, no matter the difficulty of Apple and Adobe executives and legal departments finding a way to get on the same page about it all.

Just one more reason why we lurve open source.

Artist David Scott Leibowitz — whose impressionistic works for the iPhone were recently featured on CoM — teamed up with developer Andrew C. Stone for an app billed as the first mobile iPhone art gallery.

Called iCreated, the app ($.99 for the first week, $1.99 after that) comes preloaded with 18 works by Leibowitz. Other artists, like Russ Croop, who like to use the iPhone are also featured — and all of the works tell you what was used to make them, should you want to try your hand. Users can upload their own doodles to the public gallery and save or email them.

While the iCreated selection can’t trump sites like Poolga, which offers hundreds of slick wallpapers from designers and illustrators gratis, compared to some paid iPhone wallpaper apps it offers a little push to try some art of your own and share it.

So if you’ve downloaded Brushes, were inspired by the New Yorker cover, now’s the time to get busy.