News, apps, rumors, hacks and cracks
The Dev Team posted a message yesterday suggesting that iPhone 3GS owners should prepare their device for jailbreak.
Remember we warned you to stay away from any updates to 3.1 if you want to be able to jailbreak or unlock your 3GS.
Well this is an additional message to all you 3GS owners that would like to jailbreak your device sometime soon, but this advice comes with a warning! A warning that if you accidentally upgrade to 3.1, you will not be able to use Ultransn0w, so please re-read and double check this warning at the bottom of this post before proceeding.
During the restore process iTunes nicely keeps these oh-so-top-secret-files in a lovely accessible place for us to copy out and backup, that place? /tmp on Mac OS X or %TEMP% on Windows. Thanks Apple — handy!
The downside to this approach is that you actually need to go through the restore process to get these signed files, which has risks if you are anywhere near 3.1 or 3.1 beta
Jump the break for instructions on how to get the iBEC and iBSS of your iPhone 3GS. Continue reading »
Apple released the 3.1 beta firmware and SDK to developers, which seems to include a few new features such as:
The biggest change is the update of the baseband to 5.08.01.
If you don’t care about jailbreaking or unlocking your iPhone, then this doesn’t matter to you. However, if you want to keep you device jailbroken/unlocked, you should not update to 3.1 beta, or even the official 3.1 firmware when it’s released to the general public.
Like the Dev Team warned us, updating to 3.1 will prevent you from running any jailbreak method, which would make it impossible to unlock.
Ultrasn0w users must stay away from any firmware updates past 3.0 (including today’s 3.1 beta) until we release the tools that let you update the firmware without updating the baseband. For most phones out there, baseband updates are irreversible and you’ll lose ultrasn0w.
This warning does not apply to the iPhone 2G, which uses BootNeuter for the unlock, not ultrasn0w.
My advice is to wait and see. The Dev Team is most likely already picking the 3.1 beta apart. Stay tuned for more updates as they become available.
My fiance Tina is a mental therapist and she regularly has appointments with clients. She usually uses her old Samsung phone as a calendar but needless to say it is not very practical. I recently “forced” her to get an iPod Touch and one of my sales argument was that she could use it as a calendar and that she would be able to sync it with Google calendar over the air. Note that these were just arguments I pulled out of my butt so she agrees to get an iTouch (yes, the iTouch is more for me than for her)…
We finally bought a 32GB iPod Touch and I started looking into ways to sync an iPhone calendar with Google calendar. I found many options but all involved some third party apps and that’s clearly not what I was looking for. I was very surprised that Apple hadn’t included this feature in the iPhone/iPod Touch until I actually found an article on JAIB saying that the new OS 3.0 supports CalDAV with SSL so your are technically able to sync Google calendar with your iPhone or iPod Touch, as long as you have internet access.
Here is how to set up your iPhone or iPod Touch to sync calendars with Google over the air:
1. On your iPhone, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account > Other > Add CalDAV Account
2. For the CalDAV settings, enter the following information. Note that your username should be the email address you use to access your Google calendar as well as the password.
3. Then tap “Next” and it should verify your information.
4. If you can’t get your account verified, tap “Advanced settings” and make sure that “Use SSL” is On, that the port is 443, and that your Account URL includes the sign “@” in your email address.
That’s it!
Now every time you add an event to your iPhone calendar, it will also show up on your Google calendar, and vice versa. You obviously need to have internet access from your iPod or iPhone for the data to sync. Note that the sync is not immediate. It sometimes takes a few seconds but besides this, it works very well.
There is a simple trick to enable the emoji keyboard on your iPhone. This trick has been around for a few days but for some reason, I never wrote about it. Loyal reader David emailed me earlier today and reminded me of this.
1. Install Spell Number from the App Store (it’s a free app)
2. Launch the app and type 91929394.59
3. Press the home button
4. Go to Settings > General > Keyboards, and under “Japanese” select “Emoji”
You can now use these crazy little japanese icons. Note that you can delete the app if you don’t want to keep it. Your Emoji keyboard will still be activated.
There is a new simple hack that allows iPhone 2G users to enable MMS on their iPhone. Your iPhone has to be jailbroken to enable MMS. If you don’t know how to jailbreak your iPhone, please read this.
Now go to Cydia and look for the application called ActivateMMS2G from the iSpazio source. Install and reboot your iPhone and bingo!
As I predicted in a post I wrote earlier today about the future iPhone 3GS jailbreak, the Dev Team officially announced that it will hold on on the release of the iPhone 3GS jailbreak.
The reason is simple. Apple is most likely coming up with 3.0.1 firmware very soon. Releasing the jailbreak would basically allow Apple to figure out what exploit the Dev Team used to jailbreak the 3GS and fix it.
Once the jailbreak is out, Apple will fix the iBoot-family bug we use to accomplish it. They 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.
It is possible that Apple will find the bug we use without our handing it to them on a silver platter (via a public jailbreak). In that case, we will have delayed our jailbreak for “nothing”. But we’d rather be safe than sorry!
Apple is surely coming out with a 3.0.1 firmware release shortly. They need to fix ultrasn0w. They need to fix some UI issues. 3.0 is buggy and 3.0.1 is coming. We’re going to wait and see what 3.0.1 brings before figuring out the release date for our version of the jailbreak.
Hopefully, Apple will release 3.0.1 soon and won’t find the bug used to jailbreak the iPhone 3GS. Cross your fingers!
Less than a week after making the first steps towards an iPhone 3GS jailbreak, GeoHot posted more evidence of it. The jailbreak was made possible by using the 24Kpwn exploit the Dev Team talked about a few days ago.
The bad news is that we’re gonna have to wait a bit to jailbreak our iPhone 3GS. Apple is about to release firmware 3.0.1 and it would make little sense for the Dev Team to release their jailbreak now. Instead, it is going to wait a bit and update PwnageTool and RedSn0w once 3.0.1 is out.
I don’t know about you guys, but having a stock iPhone 3GS drives me nuts. I miss my jailbreak!
One of the new features of the 3.0 firmware is numerical battery. This feature, which has been available for jailbroken iPhones for a long time, lets you see the percentage of the battery left. It’s a really neat feature as I think it’s more accurate that the little battery logo to figure out how much battery you have left.
It took me a while to find out how to activate the battery percentage as this feature is kinda burried in the settings.
To turn numerical battery on, simply go to Settings > General > Usage.
Feel free to contact me should you have tips & tricks about the new iPhone 3.0 firmware.
If you’ve used Cydia, Icy, or even Appulous, the concept of an alternative to the App Store is old news to you, but soon there will be a new kid in town that will be the first App Store competitor using BitTorrent technology. This new app for jailbroken iPhones only is called appDowner.
appDowner was created by developer Alec Renolds back in 2008 with the idea to create a simple BitTorrent client for the iPhone. Unfortunately the project was put on hold for a while due to personal issues. But Renolds is now back at it and has expanded his original concept to create a complete replacement to Apple’s App Store.
Unlike the App Store, there will be no app approval process and most applications submitted will be available for download within a week. appDowner can also be used as “client for non-app related downloads”, which in other words means you’ll be able to illegally download music directly from the app.
Something that’s not really clear about appDowner is whether or not you will be able to download cracked applications for your iPhone.
We’ve seen our share of App Store replacements. The 2 most serious ones, Cydia Store and Rock Your Phone, haven’t reached a critical audience yet. Will appDowner be able to do that?
appDowner is still being worked on and it should be available in Cydia for download soon.
This is an undocumented feature of the iPhone 3GS. Apparently the new iPhone is waterproof… What?
Well, this guy was trying out video recording by the swimming pool when the iPhone accidentally slipped off his hand. The result: the first underwater video recorded with an iPhone. Check out the video below to see it for yourself.
