Iphone-dev team has an exciting new year gift. Its going to release software unlock method for 3G iphone on new year eve. They had been working hard on this project under the codename 'yellowsn0w'. It is in the final phases of packing in a user friendly user interface. They are going to release a video demo of the same on around Christmas time. See their blog about this update. There are a two pre-conditions on which you can unlock your phone. It should have a baseband of version 2.11.07 or prior. It should be jailbroken. Jailbroken phone is a requirement because the 3G unlock software is distributed using the cydia installer which is available only on jailbroken phones.
Happy Christmas and New Year
Update: See the video demo of software unlock of 3G iphone
iphonehacks is running an article where it pointed out that the famous developer Erica Sadun has discovered that the recently released iphone firmware2.2 SDK offers an option to export video-out live to a connected TV screen. This is an undocumented feature in the SDK.
There is already a working prototype to prove that this thing works in real. See this video where the live camera is projected on a TV screen.
It does not stop here. Greg Hartstein developed an impressive prototype with on-screen controls where he can extend the iphone desktop to the tv screen. i.e you can use the tv-screen as additional space of your iphone. This is like extending the display of computer output to more than one monitors. Laptop users with windows operating system might be familiar how to extend their laptop screen to a standalone monitor. See this video which demonstrates the feature that I am talking about. Please be patient, it comes towards the end after showing some other interesting possibilites.
Like iphone ? Love linux ? Want both of them together ? Then your answer is here. A new project named "iphoneLinux" is going to achieve this. The project is in very infant stage right now. Currently, it provides only a command line interface to interact with the iphone sub-system. You can connect to a terminal over USB connection. The best part of this project is that your iphone becomes a dual boot system (like having windows and linux on the same system). At the boot time you can choose which OS you want to boot into.
For me, the enormous potential in this project is obvious. Speaking at a technical level, currently they have support for access to screen, serial driver, serial over USB driver, Interrupts, MMU, clocks etc. But all the special features of iphone are yet to be brought under the hood. Currently there is no support for wireless networking, touchscreen, sound, accelerometer, baseband etc. Do no slam it down saying that this is useless. It is just about matter of time when they will be supported.
BTW, they are recruiting people for the project. If you are good at kernel hacking and type of guy who figures out things on you own, you can put your head in it. Keep track of their informal blog to get updates about the project.
A quick round up before going into the details. There is no software method to unlock the 3G iphone yet. The iphone-dev team is working hard and getting closer day-by-day. They were successful in replacing the baseband on the 3G iphones, but it seems that the procedure had some problems. They want to release a robust solution as a software method to unlock 3G iphones. See their team blog for updates.
There is a SIM-based solution also to unlock the 3G iphone. Many people call this hardware method, but I would like to call it SIM-based solution as this approach does not involve opening the iphone and playing with the chips/circuits. This is first done by Brazilian hackers. It involves a wafer-thin card that piggybacks on your SIM and fooling the iphone into thinking that it is a test SIM thereby allowing any carrier. But they are selling this solution at a very premium price of $250-$350.
Coming to the main topic of this post, iphonehacks is running an article which says that a vietnamese hacker is able to unlock 3G iphones using a pure hardware method. It involves removing the baseband chip from the motherboard, reading the contents of it, reprogramming the chip with modified data, and then putting it back on the motherboard. Sounds exciting, isn't it ? I feel that he is generous because he charge only $80 for the whole process which takes about an hour.
The above two solutions (SIM-based and hardware method) does not work with the 2.2 firmware on 3G iphones because the firmware upgrades the baseband. This creates one more challenge to the hackers and puts apple ahead in the cat-and-mouse game. The upgrade of baseband with the 2.2 firmware happens only on 3G iphones. I seems that there is no way to downgrade the baseband once it gets upgraded. So, think twice before upgrading your 3G iphones to the latest 2.2 firmware.
Before going into the details of the application, it will be interesting to know some funny things that happened with it. Google launched the application on Friday, 14-Nov-2008. But the application did not appear in the apple store even on monday. Apple forgot to add the application to their app store. There are also reports that the delay is because of the apple's strict review process. But this should definitely have been coordinated better for the launch.
Talking about the application, as is obvious from the name, it searches the web based on voice commands. No need to type into those tiny keyboard offered by mobile phones. Just ask the question. Added to this, the application exploits the GPS in the phone to provide location based services. So, you can ask "Where is the nearest Starbucks coffee shop?". Interesting, isn't it ? The results that you get are text results but optimized for mobile phone display. The phone numbers etc stand out explicitly so that you can use them to dail out.
As with other google products, this application is also free. The initial hands-on reports on this application says that the application is awesome and accurate. Accurate both in terms of recognizing the voice and the results. This application cannot be used for any other phone functions like dailing your contacts etc. This application is purely meant for search.
There is no doubt that apple, with its touch technology, has raised the bar very high for the mobile phone industry. I am sure many of it competitors are still spending sleepless nights. Other players like HTC & LG had come up with their version of touch technology but definitely not surpassing apple. Ofcourse, apple will always have the early bird advantage.
It seems that people are exploring ways other than touch to impress customers. That is what Microsoft exactly did. They come up with a voice command interface to control the mobile phone. While this is not new to the mobile phone industry, the set of features offered by this new software are much more superior to what was already seen.
Earlier, many mobile phone vendors offered what is commonly known as "voice dialing". To be able to do that, a voice tag has to be associated with a particular contact. Then only one would be able to dial that contact using voice. But now, with Microsoft’s "voice command" software, there is no need to tag each contact. You just say the name. The software identifies the corresponding contact and asks you for confirmation before dialing. If you say “yes” it would dail that number or else if you say “no” it would try to find the next closest match. It uses something called speaker independent phonetic speech recognition and text-to-speech technology.
This is nothing compared to hell lot of others features offered by this software. It can be used for e-mail notifications, spoken caller ID, controlling media player, controlling utilities, calendar lookup etc. It can be used to quickly check the time, date, and battery level also. See this link from Microsoft to see the feature list or even better, see the software in action in this video.
I realize that I have been writing more and more articles about firmware hacking and related stuff. It makes me more and more excited to learn how to play with your gadgets. Especially playing with their core. Now this article is about putting custom firmware on your ipod and many other personal music players. But first let me warn you that doing this will void your warranty.
Rockbox is an open source firmware written for personal music players. It supports wide range of players like apple ipod, iriver, sandisk sansa etc. The latest 3.0 version of the frimware is released in sept-08. The question anyone would ask first is "Why should I upgrade ?". I guess the answer is simple "Because it has loads of features that your vendor would not have provided"
Take apple ipod for example. It supports very limited codecs (file formats). But with this rockbox firmware, your same ipod can play upto 15 different codecs including ogg/vorbis, wma, realaudio-cook format etc. You can have themes for the user interface. Can you believe that you can play "doom" on ipod ? yes, doom. It has plugin support where you can add games, applications. In case of ipods, this firmware is supported for ipods right from the 1st gen ones. So, you can breath new life into your otherwise obsolete ones.
