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.
iPhone Musings
Thanks to work, I got myself an iPhone. I’ve been using it now for almost a couple of weeks, and I thought it worth throwing some thoughts up here on my impressions thus far.
I’ve been a Sony Ericsson user ever since I got my first mobile 7 or 8 years ago, as I’ve always just preferred their interface to what Nokia were doing. That means I’m upgrading from a k800i, but it’s not really fair to put both within the same category of mobile phone, the iPhone really is an entirely different beast. Firstly, there’s the feel of the thing, I don’t know what it is, and I don’t quite know how to explain it, but it just feels good in your hand. There’s a solid, weighty feel to the device, and the decision to not make the back shiny like the iPod range means it feels warmer and looks cleaner. Then there’s the screen, so vivid, so clear, even in bright sunshine (tested that today), that any kind of content just looks gorgeous.
Interface wise it’s not too much of a surprise to me, since I’ve been using an iPod Touch for the past few months. It’s all laid out sensibly, and you can find your way around fairly intuitively. The camera is not anywhere near as bad as I’d read, giving nice clear images. The problem seems to be that it updates at a pretty slow rate, and holding the device steady is incredibly difficult. This tends to give you very bright, but slightly blurry, photos. The interface is always responsive, and it’s simply a surprise that it all works as well as the demos on the Apple website have always shown. And it doesn’t matter how many times you turn the device into landscape mode to look at a photo, it’s still cool to see the photo automatically rotate with you.
Text input, the bane of any portable device, actually works quite nicely. The trick is simply to ignore any mistakes you might be making and keep on typing, allowing the auto-correct to pick up any mistakes you’ve made. It really is freakishly accurate, even on words where you’ve barely hit a single key correctly, it still somehow manages to come up with the right word. It would be nice if a similar thing was available on OS X too, it would save me a lot of time. Web access is slow on the EDGE network, but not so slow that it makes it unusable, and it’s certainly just fine for email access. It’s also come in quite handy so far for looking up cinema times when we’ve been out and about, and I’m sure there will be plenty more opportunities in the future for it to shine. Would it be nice if the access was faster? Sure. Is it a deal breaker? Not by a long shot.
There are some annoying things, like notes not synching up with anything, like the Stickies I have on my Mac, or the notes I have in Mail. Or that some applications seem to understand me rotating the screen (like the browser) and others don’t (like Mail). It would be nice to use the entire interface in landscape mode because typing that way is so much easier (bigger keys). But overall, the experience is pleasurable, and simply being able to carry one device in my pocket rather than two (a phone and iPod) is a step forward for me at least.
Coolest moment so far - buying the new Supergrass album directly from the device and having it download all the tracks over the air. It’s like living in the future.
