HTC Diamond: Rotate the phone to lock and unlock

HTC Diamond is one the new mobile handsets from HTC. Few people are aware the HTC is the actual manufracturer behind popular brands like O2, Imate, Dopod etc. Now HTC has entered the market directly. It is brining out interesting models with innovative new features. The cube technology in the HTC touch is a challenger for iphone. Though I personally am not impressed with the cube feature, its pretty good. It does not have multi touch capability. May be I am biased because I am an iphone user. 

Anyway, coming to the main point, the new model of HTC touch which is named "Diamond", has a host of interesting features. Its fast. Its supports touch gestures (but still single touch). One of the features that I feel stands out of the lot is the way the screen can be locked and unlocked. You just rotate the phone to lock the screen. You rotate the phone on the other direction to unlock the screen. May be time taking but vey different. See this video for a demonstration

Multi-touch 3D holographic projection system

This is simply mind blowing. We are going closer and closer to the "minority report" style of user interface. Engadget is running an article about a 3D holographic projection system developed by a company called "Obscura digital". They developed a technology where you control the projected objects in thin air with hand gestures. Really hats off them. You should see the video to appreciate it.

Iphone 2.0.1 firmware updates 3G baseband

There seems to be lot of confusion around the latest 2.0.1 firmware from apple in relation to unlocking. It seems that this firmware updates the baseband only on 3G phones and not on 2G phones. However, both the 2G & 3G iphones cannot be unlocked(as of now) with the latest pwnage 2.0.1 tool.

What this means is that you cannot unlock the 2G/3G iphone with the existing tools if you upgrade firmware to the latest 2.0.1. Apple released this firmware fixing the bugs in 2.0 firmware and making some performance improvements. The 2.0 firmware does not upgrade the baseband even on 3G phones. Firmware 2.0 on 2G iphones can be unlocked using the latest pwnage 2.0.1 tool, but 3G iphones on 2.0 firmware cannot be unlocked yet. See the blog of iphone-dev team which have clarification on the above confusion.

The earlier vulnerabilities exploited by the tools like ziphone, pwnage etc will be fixed in the new baseband. So, apple threw one more challenge to the hackers keeping itself ahead in the catch-up game. The hackers need to find new vulnerabilities to hack the latest 3G baseband in 2.0.1 firmware.

What can you expect ?
- For 2G iphones, hackers will shortly release unlock tools for 2.0.1 firmware
- For 3G iphones, hackers will shortly release unlock tools for 2.0 firmware(not 2.0.1)
- For 3G iphones, hackers will take some time to release unlock tools for 2.0.1 firmware

Iriver spinn: music player with touch screen and spin wheel

It seems that touch screen for gadgets is becoming standard after iphone showed it to the world. Engadget is running an article about the new music player from iriver named spinn. It has a cool user interface sporting a touch screen and a spin wheel. See the video that recently surfaced giving a demo of this cool gadget.

Besides the common features, it has bluetooth capability, TV, picture browser etc. This is not yet available world wide. It is going to be released in south korea shortly. Moreover, this is not going to be easy on the pocket. Pre-order pricing indicates that an 8GB model costs $299, which is same as 8G ipod touch model.

Pwnage 2.0 : Unlock 2.0 firmware on non-3G phones

iphone 2.0 is the latest firmware that is released by apple. Apparently, this is the same firmware that runs on the newly released 3G phones also. This new firmware brings a bunch of new features. Some of them include: push email, support for microsoft exchange server, better email, contact search, scientific calculator, additional languages, support more email attachments like powerpoint etc.

Now the good news is that you can upgrade your non-3G phone to this firmware and can jailbreak+activate+unlock it. Iphone dev team, has release their new Pwnage 2.0.1 tool for public consumption. This pwnage 2.0.1 was released immediately after fixing some problems found in pwnage 2.0. Obviously, one should use the latest tool to unlock their 2.0 firmwares. There is a bad news also. This tool is currently available only for mac users. However, windows users need not get disappointed as there are other ways to unlock the phones.

Naturally, all the community is out there to help you in the upgrade + unlock process. See the pwnage discussion forums at hackintosh.com. In case you do not know, hackintosh is the home for the Iphone dev team which released this pwnage tool. So you might be able get help from the authors. Here is the full tutorial with scree shots of pwnage 2.0 for mac users. Here is the step-by-step instructions from iphonehacks for windows users. Here is one more tutorial for windows users from iunlocked.

iphone 3G unlocked using sim based solution

Apparently, this is the worlds first unlocking solution available for the 3G model. This came from a brazilian hacker within 2 days after the official launch. The hack is a hardware method of building a sim adapter. It will trick the iphone to believe that the inserted sim is a test sim and it allows all the operations from that sim. See the report from iphonehacks about this. You can visit the original authors page also (It is in portugese).

This technique does not need any software/hardware hacking. You need not jailbreak the firmware also. But unfortunately this is going to be a costly affair. It seems that they are charging around $250 for their solution. See this article about the pricing.

On a related note, iphone dev team announced that they are able to jailbreak the iphone 3G model. Yet another worlds first. They will be releasing the new pawnage tool 2.0 shortly, after some testing. See the report on this from iphonehacks.

May be we should recap a little bit of history. It is announced that iphone 3G runs the 2.0 version of the firmware. The 2.o firmware had been released earlier to the launch of 3G phones. 2.0 version can be used on the older non-3G phones also. As per the confirmations, the 2.0 firmware on non-3G phones can be jailbroken and unlocked. There is no confirmation for this on the 3G models.

GPS for the old non-GPS iphones

If you are an early adopter of iphone which did not have the GPS capablity and if you wish that you also had GPS, you are not left far behind. You can shell out some money and can get an add-on for your iphone and make it GPS-enabled.

Holux is one of the makers of GPS receiver devices. You can use its device (M1000b/M1200b) to pick the GPS location and feed it into the iphone. The best parts is that it can be integrated into the maps application provided by default. To do that you need to install an application named "GPS Live" which can read the GPS location input from the external GPS device and point the map to the exact location.

The whole package of Holux GPS device + connecting cable costs around $100. If you already have a Holux GPS receiver, the connecting cable costs only $16. It can be ordered from here.
The "GPS Live" application can continiously update your current location on the map. To see the device in action, see this video on youtube. See the instruction to download "GPS Live"

It is important to acknowledge the very first efforts on bringing the GPS to iphone. It is by an application called "xGPS" (link here). They found a way to integrate the input data to the Maps.app application. This the gateway to feed the GPS location input from the external GPS device to the default maps application.