Archive for September 12th, 2008

The iPhone 2.1 is out. It contains the following updates as listed by Apple:

- decrease in call set-up failures andcall drops
- significantly improve battery life for most users
- dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
- improve email reliability, notable fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
- faster installation of 3rd party applications
- fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes if you have lots of 3rd party applications
- improved performance of text messaging
- faster loading and searching of contacts
- improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
- repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
- option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts
- Genius playlist creation

The 2.1 firmware is build 5F136 (weighing in at 237.8MB) and can be directly downloaded through iTunes. The new firmware also contains a number of security fixes including the well publicized passcode flaw.

Jailbreak for 2.1 is not avaliable yet.

It's amazing, how curious some people are. iPhone hacker and data-forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski explained that iPhone snaps a screenshot of your most recent action -- regardless of whether it's sending a text message, e-mailing or browsing a web page -- in order to cache it. This is purely for aesthetic purposes: When an iPhone user taps the Home button, the window of the application you have open shrinks and disappears. In order to create that shrinking effect, the iPhone snaps a screenshot, Zdziarski said.

The phone presumably deletes the image after you close the application. But anyone who understands data is aware that in most cases, deletion does not permanently remove files from a storage device. Zdziarski demonstrated that if you know what you're doing (and you've got over an hour), you can recover the file system and see many, many of these grabs.

"This flaw can only be exploited by somebody with physical access to a device, but your phone could get into the hands of someone with more malicious intent," he said. "Obviously, you don't want to trust any of your data to a passcode."

Gadget Lab is also reporting that Zdziarski said forensics experts have actually used this method to solve serious crimes.

via gizmodo and gadget lab

After breaking apart iPod Touch folks from iFixIt disassembled iPod Nano:

Separately, iFixIt dissected the new iPod nano and observed that the unit's 3.2 mm wide dock connector "looks pretty big compared to the iPod" itself, making it unlikely that Apple will be able to slim down player any further without developing a new dock connector.

A particularly surprising find was that the new nano uses a real piece of curved glass, "about .7 mm thick on the edges, and 1.7 mm thick in the middle," to cover the LCD display. The glass is said to be completely separate from the player's anodized aluminum enclosure, with nothing holding it in place outside the force of the adjacent components.

The LCD itself "is actually almost exactly the same size as the 3rd Gen Nano LCD," iFixIt said, with the only difference being a resolution of 240x320 rather than 320x240.

Among the nano's internal components are a Apple-branded ARM processor manufactured by Samsung in July with on-board DRAM on-package, three other small Apple-branded chips of unknown origin, and an 8 GB Toshiba flash chip. "Unfortunately, the battery is soldered to the logic board," iFixIt said. "Replacing the Nano's battery isn't going to be easy."

via appleinsider and ifixit

The folks at iFixIt received a brand new iPod Touch, which they disassembled right away.

Both the touch's 3.5-inch LCD display as well as its Lithium-ion polymer battery are held in place with strips of double-sided tape. The WiFi antenna and circuitry, which are located at the top of the unit, are connected to the main logic board by wide orange cable that were designed to prevent external noise from interfering with the digital signals as they travel along the device, iFixIt says.

The specialty online reseller, which offers replacement parts for Macs and iPods, was particularly excited by its discovery of an unpublicized Broadcom BCM4325 Bluetooth chip within the device. The particular chipset supports BT2.1+EDR, and is necessary for the touch's built-in support of Nike+ iPod technology. It's unclear, however, whether the chip supports A2DP, which would pave the way for Apple and third-party developers to introduce stereo headphones for the player.

iFixIt also discovered brown rectangular component centered about three quarters of the way down the touch's logic board, which is suspected to be the device's speaker. Other discoveries include a 3.7 V Lithium-ion polymer battery with part number 616-0404, NAND flash memory from Micron with part number 29F64G08TAA, and an Apple-branded Samsung-manufactured ARM processor with SDRAM that's similar to the one employed by the iPhone.

via appleinsider and ifixit

Everyone who has owned a cellphone over the last 10 years should at some point pour one out in thanks to Cliff Kushler, one of the inventors of the T9 text entry system. Now Cliff is smartly shifting his focus on touchscreens with Swype—a way to type blindingly fast on a touchscreen by tracing your finger or stylus over the letters you want without lifting up, connect-the-dots style. It looks frankly amazing in a demo:

The only way Apple can fix the exploit that the iPhone Dev Team has been using to Jailbreak iPhone’s and iPod Touch’s is to fix their hardware, but it seems Apple has figured out a way to program iTunes 8 to detect and prevent the Pwnage exploit. The screenshot below from iTunes 8 using a Pwned ipsw (with an unPwned device attached) is one example.

The Dev Team reacted promptly:

“The nice thing about iTunes decisions is that we can provide you with patches to counter them. We have one such patch already for Mac iTunes 8 for iPod touch. We’ll be working out the full suite of patches for all the combinations over the next week.”

Dev Team also published two interesting screenshots: