Meet the Fockers

From Cupertino ... -- Picture courtesy Apple Inc.

by blogSpotter
I've now had my iPhone for almost two months. In that length of time, I've discovered almost all of the iPhone quirks. Let me first give the expected "holy sh**" over the fact that Apple slashed the price from $599 to $399. They've offered a $100 store credit to early adaptors, but we who paid $599 are still not amused. A $200 cash refund would be better. Industry observers say that such a big price drop on a new product line is unusual for Apple -- they may have been trying extra hard to sell their one millionth unit by September 30th.

I used an internet hack to activate my phone. The cheapest AT&T plan would be $70 plus/month with taxes and fees; there's no way I could justify that expense when my RAZR's T-Mobile pay-as-you-go averages maybe $150 per year. So I did the hacktivation which gives me a very expensive iPod without phone capabilities. Having done that, I could never get YouTube to work on my hacked phone -- turns out to be a known problem. You have to replace three files in the /Lockdown directory on your phone. Before you do that, you have to "jailbreak" your phone and then make the changes using iFuntastic (for Macs) or iBrickr (for Windows) -- these are iPhone file browsers. Until last week, "jailbreak" was a terribly difficult, convoluted 10-step process that involved command line interface and other super-tech acrobatics. I was too "faint of heart" to risk my iPhone with that process. NullRiver has just this week blessed us with a software app called "AppTap" that circumvents that horrible 10-step process with a simple one-step install. I effectively "jail broke" my phone, installed iBrickr on my Vista laptop and installed the files necessary to fix YouTube. I spent much of last evening checking out YouTube now that it's working. Now many more hours can be wasted! :-)

iPhoneSimFree (a newly formed company) is now offering software to unlock the iPhone Sim card. The software is being offered thru resellers -- I bought mine from an Aussie company for $50. The order is still being processed; am hoping to turn my iPhone into a T-Mobile Go-phone. Between this and the AppTap addition, my iPhone is starting to have the flexibility and usability of a Palm Treo. Excellent! Isn't this what Apple should've aimed for to begin with? Something that was open, intuitive and easy to customize? Apparently they wanted to protect the phone function from bumbling fingers, as well as look after the interests of their business partner AT&T. Well guess what? Some of us don't want to use protection! (Somehow that doesn't sound right :-) )

Let's see, what could mess up this picture of hacking nirvana? Apple could do things to disable hacks with future software releases. Or they could just kick over our ant hill by making us reinstall prior cumulative hacks. If they want to keep hackers happy, they will do neither of those things – they’ll make future releases "play nice" with others. And ex-nay on the price drops unless you want zero attendees at your next breakthrough event. Enough said? Okay, it's time to go play with YouTube some more. I wonder if they have Carrot Top?

Footnote: I already bought the light green video nano – my old nano will go to a relative in Austin. Some things you can’t do without.

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