RedSn0w has been very hot for the last few days. After releasing the beta version and testing it out for a while, the Dev Team officially released RedSn0w 0.9, which didn’t contain the IPCC tethering hack that would allow tethering on iPhone OS 3.1.2.

It has now been fixed as the Dev Team updated RedSn0w to 0.9.3, which now includes the IPCC tethering hack. For those of you who have no idea what “IPCC tethering hack” means, here is more information:

It allows you to install cellphone Carrier Bundles that aren’t officially signed by Apple. This lets you, for instance, install a Carrier Bundle that allows you to use your iPhone as a way to connect your PC to the internet (through your 3G cell connection). This hack is always installed on 3G and 3GS phones by redsn0w 0.9.3 (no selection is required). It isn’t included at all in 0.9.2 (it’s still in a trial phase). Note that carriers may not like you tethering behind their back so you do so at your own risk.

So by jailbreaking your iPhone using RedSn0w 0.9.3, you will automatically get the base for iPhone tethering, but you will still have to download the right MobileConfigs file from http://www.benm.at/help/help.php and install it, directly from your iPhone.

Note that this website has saved my butt many many times when traveling overseas. As a matter of fact, http://www.benm.at/help/help.php saved my butt just hours ago. I am currently in Thailand and the mobile carrier I am using doesn’t allow tethering. I quickly visited BenM.at and downloaded the right MobileConfigs file, which allows me to write this article you are currently reading by tethering my iPhone (aka using my iPhone as a modem).

To get the tethering hack, you will have to jailbreak your iPhone using RedSn0w 0.9.3. It is available for download from here and here is my RedSn0w tutorial. For the latest information about RedSn0w, please check out this page.

Following an article I wrote about a month ago about my experience finding a carrier for my iPhone while traveling through Australia, I wanted to write a quick post about my experience in New Zealand.

As I said in a post earlier last week, internet in Australia sucks big time, which makes me miss AT&T and I was wondering what kind of pay-as-you-go iPhone plan I could get in New Zealand. Prior to flying there, I contacted Chris Rawson, a writer at TUAW who recently moved to New Zealand to ask him what carrier he would recommend.

Chris suggested I go with Vodafone, who apparently is the largest carrier in NZ. Great, I thought. Now I just have to find a Vodafone store when we get in Auckland.

We flew from Sydney to Auckland. We went through the customs without much problems and as we were walking out, I noticed a Vodafone kiosk right in the airport, next to the car rentals offices. Perfect! I walked there, inquired about prices and in just minutes minutes, I had a fully activated SIM card as well as 100MB of data, which is what I need the most.

I also charged the SIM card with $50 which gives me $20 worth of talk time and an extra 500MB of data to satisfy by internet addiction. It took about 10 minutes from the time I started talking to the Vodafone guy to the time I walked away.

The 3G coverage in Auckland and in major cities is good, but as soon as you drive in the country, which is pretty much 95% of the country, you have to rely on GPRS or in some cases, don’t get any signal at all.

Dealing with Vodafone was a pleasant experience. Even though the coverage is not great in NZ, it’s better than nothing, and it allows me to write this post, while tethering my iPhone from Otorohanga.

We will be in NZ for a few more days, then we will return to Australia where we will stay in Melbourne for a few days before driving all the way west to Perth. I can see much more tethering in my future

With the release of BlackSn0w, it is now possible to tether your iPhone running OS 3.1.2.

For those of you who don’t know what tethering is, it basically allows you to use your iPhone as a modem in order to share the internet connection with a computer. For example, this post was written on my laptop while tethering my iPhone in Los Angeles airport.

Step 1: Unlock your iPhone using BlackSn0w. See my BlackSn0w tutorial.

Step 2: From your iPhone, navigate to http://m.peacefulinsanity.com/Tether.mobileconfig and hit the install button and confirm. This will install the custom IPCC file.

Step 3: Reboot your iPhone.

Step 4: Go to Settings > General > Network > Internet Tethering and turn it on.

You’re done!

You should now be able to tether your iPhone, either via bluetooth or USB.

Pretty simple, isn’t it?

I’ve been in the Midwest for the last 3 weeks, traveling around Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan with very few opportunities to get on wifi. Worse, most of the places I went to didn’t even have 3G coverage, forcing me to rely on the slow Edge, when available. I am currently in Chicago (for one last day before finally going back home to San Diego) where there is some very fast 3G coverage.

The first thing I did when arriving in Chicago was to enable tethering with this simple hack. It took about a minute to get it to work and to get my laptop going. It was the first time I actually tethered my iPhone 3GS and I have to admit that I am incredibly impressed with the speed.

I didn’t make any scientific test to see how fast it really is, but it seems to me that my wifi at home is not faster than that. Every once in a while there is a little downtime but nothing really annoying.

If you want to use your iPhone to get internet on your laptop (also known as tethering), I suggest you have a look at this hack.

When Apple introduced the new iPhone 3GS in June, they unveiled two new features that had been long awaited: MMS and iPhone tethering. Unfortunately, AT&T was not one of the major carriers that were going to offer these features right away and said that they will be available “later this summer”.

Later this summer, as part of the 3.0 software, AT&T will make multimedia messaging (MMS) available at no extra cost to customers with a text messaging bundle. And, in the future, AT&T will offer tethering capability for iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G.

Very well, but we’re already one month into the summer and we haven’t heard anything at all from AT&T. No one on the major tech websites or blogs seems to really care about it either.

Hey AT&T, where the hell are my MMS and iPhone tethering?

I think AT&T has been taking its customers for granted. Not only it has overcharged its iPhone customers since day 1, but it doesn’t even provide a quality of service that would make it up for the high prices.

As MG Siegler wrote, AT&T is a big, steaming heap of failure and it is walking on thin ice right now. Its exclusive contract with Apple will expire next year and maybe it’s time for Apple to reconsider their partnership.

What do you think of AT&T? Are you satisfied by their service?

Just a few hours after Apple released firmware 3.0 to the public, some smart guy already figured out a way to hack the iPhone to allow free tethering on most carriers, including AT&T. What’s even better about this hack is that you don’t have to jailbreak your iPhone.

How to enable free tethering on iPhone 3.0?

1. On your iPhone, launch Safari

2. Go to the following website: http://help.benm.at/tethering.php

3. Find your country, select your provider, and tap “download”.

4. Go to Settings > General > Network > Internet Tethering Bluetooth or USB

5. Done!

Is this legal? Well, not really… I suggest you don’t tether your iPhone too much using this hack as carriers have a way to find out and can very well overcharge you or simply disconnect you, as UK carrier 02 reportedly said it would:

Under those terms we reserve the right to charge customers making modem use of their iPhone or disconnect them.

Use with caution…

If you read this iPhone blog on a regular basis, you know that I’m not a big Apple fan, and I take any chance I get to talk smack about them. There are enough fanboys, so someone needs to be the devil’s advocate… Last week I wrote about 7 reasons to buy the new iPhone 3G S and today I’d like to give a few reasons why the new iPhone 3G S is kind of a joke.

The Name Sucks

Lets’ start with the obvious: the name – iPhone 3G S. I had speculated about several names for the new iPhone and I really thought they would simply call it “iPhone”. You have to admit that “iPhone 3G S” is a pretty clunky name. If you were going to have a “S” in the name, why not simply call it “iPhone S”. It would have been a shorter and more “esthetically appealing” name.

The Design Is Boring

I think what I hate the most about the iPhone 3G S is the design which is exactly identical to the iPhone 3G. When I pay $560.16 for a new phone, I expect to have something that looks different from everybody else. Yes, the iPhone is a phone for the elite, I admit it. I kinda miss the days of the first iPhone, when people came to me and candidly asked me “wow, is this the iPhone?”. I was proud of it. Now everyone has an iPhone, and even worse, everyone has an iPhone that looks similar.

I was really looking forward having a revamped iPhone design. To those of you arguing with this, think about it this way. What would you say if BMW came out with the same car design twice, even though the engine was different? Any car critic would just roast BMW for their lack of creativity. Strangely, no one seems to care that the iPhone design is the same as the previous one.

The Camera Still Sucks

We went from a 2 to 3 megapixels camera. It’s better than nothing but it’s still 4 years behind every other smartphone, possibly more. The camera doesn’t even come with a flash. My old BlackBerry pearl did all this 4 years ago…

New Features Are Old News

Voice dialing, video recording and copy/paste were welcome as the messiah during WWDC. That’s BS if you want my opinion. This is just a software update, and once again, any smartphone on the market has had these features for years.

The Pricing Is Scandalous

The attractive $300 price tag for the 32GB iPhone 3G S is only applicable to new AT&T customers. While I understand the whole subsidize thing, I am really pissed I have to pay $560.16 for this new phone, especially when I see that the iPhone 3G S costs about 17% more than the G1 and 32% more than the Palm Pre over the course of a 2 year contract. AT&T is cashing in on existing customers, yet it won’t give throw them a bone and sell them the iPhone 3G S at $299?

No Tethering Or MMS At Launch

This is not specific to the iPhone 3G S, but rather to AT&T. AT&T has most likely been aware of these new features for months, and it still couldn’t manage to get its shit together on time. That’s a huge fail for AT&T who claims tethering and MMS will be available “later this summer”. At least AT&T won’t charge extra for MMS but I can’t see their future tethering plan under $30. I’ll stick to PDAnet for my free tethering.

The iPhone 3G S really is a non-event for existing 3G owners but the success of the pre-orders shows once again that fanboys are willing to throw money at anything Apple releases. If it wasn’t kind of my job to have the latest iPhone, I probably wouldn’t have upgraded.

I look forward to reading your comments and see whether you will upgrade or not.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about how an iPhone tethering plan was officially on its way, and it seems that we are getting very close to an announcement, most likely this week at MacWorld.

According to TUAW:

It’s been under the rumor banner for some time now, but we’ve been told by a trusted source that the long-awaited AT&T iPhone-as-modem tethering plans (preliminary details in MacBlogz’ post from November: 5 GB data cap, $30/month supplementary cost) may be ready for prime time during Macworld Expo this week. The tethering announcement might not rise to a keynote-worthy level; it could simply be publicized as a press release during the show.

I stick to my guess of a $40/month plan for this. Given that PDAnet already tethers your iPhone for free, I’m not signing up for this plan anytime soon.

After several rounds of rumors about an official iPhone 3G tethering plan, it seems that AT&T finally decided to offer a tethering plan for 3G users. In an interview today with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, AT&T Mobility President and CEO Ralph De La Vega said the company is working with Apple to let the iPhone serve as a tethered wireless modem for laptops “soon”.

What does “soon” mean exactly? I don’t know but I think it’s about time that AT&T offers such a plan for business users that had been requesting this since the 3G came out a few months ago. Also unknown is the cost of this future data plan. I can’t imagine it being under $40/month.

Our jailbreaker friends out there know that there are a couple alternatives to tether your iPhone. The first on is iPhoneModem, which I haven’t tried myself. The second option is PDAnet, which I reviewed before. Both apps are free but are against AT&T TOS.

I am very curious to see what the adoption rate will be for this tethering plan.

Photo Gizmodo
Via Technologizer

According to PhoneScoop, “tethering is connecting your phone to a laptop or similar data device using a data cable, usually for the purpose of connecting to the Internet on the laptop, via the phone’s wireless connection to the cell phone network. Carriers usually charge more money for accessing the Internet via tethering, as opposed to on the phone itself. Sometimes this is enforced via technology in the phone, although often it is simply the honor system and not strictly enforced”.

In our case, AT&T clearly doesn’t want you to tether your iPhone. Strangely, they don’t even have such a plan you could subscribe to in order to use your iPhone as a modem. So to make it clear, tethering your iPhone is against AT&T Terms Of Services. (more…)