Archive of thenextweb.com
The Dev Team have clearly been hard at work and have finally released the Ultrasn0w full unlock for last-gen iPhone running iPhone OS 3.0 – but unfortunately NOT the iPhone 3GS.
If you have used yellowsn0w to unlock your iPhone 3G on firmware 2.2 before, ultrasn0w should be familiar to you. Ultrasn0w is simply a replacement of yellowsn0w and it works on iPhone 3.0 OS.
This is the first time when both jailbreak & Unlock tools for iPhone 3G 3.0 have been ready, so its a pretty big deal
Instructions are pretty straight forward: (more…)
The first videos and photos claimed to be taken with an iPhone 3G S have been begun appearing on YouTube and Flickr.
You’ll need to take the media with a pinch of salt though because there’s no guarantee’s that either has actually been shot with the phone. The fact that the poster has the phone’s box on the table is a good sign though.
German blog iFun.de has posted a number of comparison shots between the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G S, the difference is significant.
And the videos, posted by (more…)
Up until now, unlocking your iPhone 3G has not been an option, leaving many iPhone Ebay buyers frustrated expecting an unlock procedure ‘any time soon…’ – well that was months ago. Thanks to the iPhone Dev Team however, the time has finally arrived and as long as you’re willing to put some time into it – you can unlock your iPhone 3G now.
I say ‘time into it’ because you’ll need to ensure you have the latest firmware installed and you’ll need to jailbreak your iPhone to unlock it via the Cydia Installer.
You can find everything you require on the iPhone Dev Team blog or follow CrunchGear’s simple instructions.
Britain’s second newspaper has thrown a rather interesting and spectacular rumor into the world. Supposedly, there are iPhone Nano’s on their way to thousands of Christmas trees all over the world. The Daily Mail reports that the little device will be launched in December.
The product will be launched in the UK at up to £150 – €190 – for pay-as-you-go customers by O2, states the conservative newspaper. An iPhone Nano will be the affordable alternative that is cheap enough for most people to give to their family and friends for Christmas.
If these rumors turn out to be true, two things will surely happen. Firstly, early adopters will be angry (like me). Secondly: time for the early majority: the iPhone is gonna be as common as the iPod – which partly owes its success to its stocking stuffer task during the joyful feast of Christmas.
But for now, it’s just a rumor. And not really a realistic one if you take the last paragraph of the Daily Mail article in account. A touch wheel on the back… are you serious?
One expert suggested the nano phone would have a touch wheel on the back and display on the front so that numbers would be dialled from behind.
UDPATE: also check out this article on Techcrunch. Foxconn is building 800.000 iPhones a week now. Are those iPhone Nanos?
Henk van Ess, Dutch Internet speaker, writer, and consultant – the type that writes an Internet tip column for the Dutch journalist trade journal – has became the European battery dealer for the iPhone 3G in just 24 hours. He’s the kind of guy that travels with huge stacks of batteries – so that he can work for nine hours on his Macbook Air. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t pleased with the battery life of the new iPhone – as the fast HDSPA sucks out all its energy in no-time. Not that van Ess blames Apple for that, as “all major phone manufacturers have to deal with that” – he writes on his corporate blog.
China BAK Battery to the rescue
Driven by the urge for a full battery, van Ess posted a question in LinkedIn – asking: “‘who brings me the smallest rechargeable battery for the iPhone 3G without silly cases”. He was looking for a solid Apple-certified battery and found out that NASDAQ company China BAK Battery made such a product. Twenty acquaintances also fancied the battery, so van Ess started a little web shop to avoid paper works. The dealer than asked whether the Internet expert would be interested in becoming the European reseller – and so it happened.
Why is this battery so great?
Van Ess called his company 3G Juice company and now offers a fine battery for European iPhone owners. It’s world’s smallest external battery for both iPhone versions – only six centimeters – and it doesn’t need any cables. But don’t be fooled by its size, as the battery doubles the life of your iPhone.
Muse
Looks like van Ess found what Timothy Ferriss describes as a muse – a relatively simple way of making money. That means: not much effort and time involved. He has his web shop running and money flowing – while improving our iPhone experience.
Update: Henk just mailed us that he is in search for an American distributor, if you’re a distributor or know someone who might be interested, get in contact with henk or leave a comment.
Your blogger waisted six hours of his life on a friggin’ phone today. The only Dutch operator that offers the iPhone 3G couldn’t handle (Dutch link) the data load the activation process required. The result? Every single iPhone had to be registered by calling up the T-Mobile headquarters. When you take in account that all the iPhone-selling stores had to do this, you won’t be surprised to hear that waiting times to get a hold of a T-Mobile HQ employee were as long as 80 minutes. That crisis resulted in a very bizarre daily schedule for me:
The line at T-Mobile store, hope you dig my yellow shoes
7 am: Getting up – jumping on my bicycle to go to Amsterdam’s largest T-Mobile Store in the Kalverstraat.
7.30 am: Arriving at the store, a forty-year old Apple fanboy hands me a coffee. There are around 30 people waiting.
8 am: Store manager hands out numbers, there are only 35 iPhones available. Just enough for the people who are already waiting. I have number 24.
9.30 am: Store opens: first lucky seven enter the store.
9.35 am: System crashes. From now on it takes around 90 minutes per customer.
11.00 am: Most of the people who were part of the first round have left the store. 28 people and I realize we’re here for quite a while. Especially as T-Mobile employees help out four friends who have just arrived. When customers tell the store manager this, he acts like he has no idea of what’s going on.
12.15 pm: The store manager now makes the same mistake and helps out a friend of his. He then disappears.
1.00 pm: Finally! There’s my number. Let’s buy that shiny object.
1.45 pm: I’m lucky since the guy who sells my iPhone manages to reach T-Mobile HQ pretty fast. It only took me thirty minutes to buy the phone. Pity that I had to wait for five hours and thirty minutes to do so.
British O2 operator has also failed
O2 also suffered from technical glitches – causing waiting lines of 90 minutes. Mobile Computer interviewed visitors no. 2 and 3 at the London Regent Street Apple Store – who left early because the whole buying process took to long:
Update: there’s a new gadget around, called the iBrick.
With the upcoming launch of the iPhone 3G in 22 countries, more and more messages of the craziness the phone causes come to our ears. Take the Brits for example, they have besieged the online stores en masse, causing peaks of 13,000 requests per second. “We’d done everything we could to cope with high demand but on that scale our Web site did struggle,” said an O2 spokesman to Reuters. “The experience wasn’t as smooth as we’d have liked it to be.”
Not surprisingly, both carriers – O2 and Carphone Warehouse – have sold out their complete online stocks. Carphone Warehouse stated that the level of interest was 10 times that for the original iPhone last year.
So the people from the U.K who also feel somewhat aroused by the sight of the shiny object but haven’t been able to place an online order, should now get their sleeping bags and start camping in front of an iPhone-selling store.
When Steve Jobs introduced the 3G iPhone some time ago, one of the slides he showed was the list of 22 lucky countries who were going to start distributing the groundbreaking device starting 11 July. Lo and behold, Belgium was on that list.
Now, in my home country, there are 3 major telecom operators, the biggest ones being Proximus (owned by government-controlled Belgacom) and Mobistar (part of the Orange group), followed by BASE. Mobistar was ‘chosen’ as the launch partner in Belgium, unsurprisingly since the company is part of Orange, the iPhone’s distributor in France. Note that the 3G network isn’t even operational in Belgium yet since Mobistar opted for EDGE instead, and when it will be at the end of this year, it’ll only cover 80% of the country. Proximus was a more likely partner anyhow because they already have a 3G network, but ok, Mobistar it is. Ok, Mobistar has 3G (80% coverage), BASE is EDGE. My bad.
Then something weird happened. All of the sudden, Mobistar started backtracking on the launch date, and the Apple Belgium website changed the date from 11 July to ’soon’.
Everyone was baffled, people started to vent their frustrations, and Mobistar was probably ferociously trying to fix things behind the scenes. Of course, they did nothing to engage in a conversation with the early adopters who would be their first iPhone customers.
Then, they screwed up again. Today, in a throw at the epic fail award of the year, Mobistar cancelled a press conference which it initiated to share more information about the delay of the iPhone launch. Basically, that means they are delaying their delay, officially because their ‘commercial offer isn’t fully perfected just yet’. This of course spurred a flurry of blog posts and Twitter messages bashing Mobistar, especially since no one (including members of the press) is able to reach anyone from Mobistar for comments.
Mobistar, if you’re reading, which I’m actually pretty sure you’re not: you turned something extremely potential into a massive PR campaign fail which is going to resonate for months and months. I call epic fail, and I doubt anyone will disagree. Proximus and BASE are probably rolling on the floor laughing at you right now. If it weren’t so tragic, I’d be too.
