iPhone Hacking
Hacking the iPhone is incredibly easy. I did it with ZiPhone and the process was thus…
1. Close iTunes, disconnect the phone from your Mac.
2. Open up Activity Viewer and find the “iTunes Helper” process and kill it.
3. Plug the phone into your Mac with the supplied cable.
4. Start ZiPhone.
5. Click the option of your choice on the left. I’m sticking with O2, so just wanted to Jailbreak it.
6. Click Go.
7. Wait 45 seconds.
8. Marvel at the new Installer option that’s been added to your home screen.
I don’t guarantee all these steps are required, but these are what worked for me.
The iPhone is a great device, but once it’s jailbroken and you can start installing stuff on there, it becomes an amazing device. I’ve spent a lot of time playing Solitaire and Lights Out, two nice little games. MobileScrobler lets you listen to last.fm radio stations and playlists and automatically updates your profile with what you’ve been listening to on the device as you listen to it, and that’s very cool. ScummVM lets you play Monkey Island and the other Lucasarts games, although I found it quite difficult to point at things just by tapping. And although it has no Google Talk support (really, where is a working Google Talk client? Isn’t it just Jabber?), MobileChat does a good job at connecting to other IM networks like MSN. And don’t underestimate the power of installing SSH and a Terminal client on there, to allow remote access to the servers of your choice.
The app store is coming from Apple in June, at which point a lot of this stuff is going to become a lot more official, but I’m very impressed by what has been made possible without official help. I’m looking forward to seeing where people take it next.
