This week Steve Jobs answered an email question from Sweden. The question was from Jezper Söderlund:
I'll keep it short.
I'm Jezper from Sweden, a long time Apple fan, currently about to replace the very last computer at home with a brand spanking new iMac i7. I'm also awaiting the release of the iPad. However, I have one question:
Will the wifi-only version somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?
Two devices, based on the same OS, with already built-in technology to share one data plan suggests a secondary contract could possibly be redundant.
From the look of your keynote, where the iPad sits well between my MacBook Pro and my iPhone, I was hoping the three of them could interact as seamless as possible.
What firmware version do you expect Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, to use on his iPhone? Probably something like 3.2 beta or 4.0 beta with many new unannounced features.
Mike from Macsoda got a response from Steve Jobs to his email wondering about the future of Final Cut Pro (40 Final Cut Pro developers were recently let go). Typically brief, Steve Jobs said:
No worries. FCP is alive and well.
Sent from my iPhone
Now let's look at the header information from the email as well:
The email looks legit as it originates from an internal Apple 17.x.x.x IP address. Here is an interesting part: Steve Jobs iPhone is listed as iPhone Mail (7D11) which means he's using firmware 3.1.2. That's not even the current version of the iPhone OS (3.1.3 - 7E18), let alone the 4.0 Beta we're were hoping to see.
GeoHot recently posted a small message on twitter. He actually responds to many users who continue to ask him about the ability to run firmware 3.1.3 jailbreak using Blackra1n.
GeoHot has always been a bit reluctant to release new versions for various minor firmware updates. His advice is in fact once again to keep firmware 3.1.2, because the latest one does not have anything interesting.
GeoHot will be certainly back on the scene with the next release of firmware 3.2 in March / April or firmware 4.0 that is expected in July.
According to the statistics just 14% of iPhone users have updated the firmware to version 3.1.3.
In particular 72.3% are still using firmware 3.1.2, less than 1% - firmware 3.1.1 and 4.6% have previous versions yet. The reasons for this are probably from the fact that 3.1.3 is only a minor update. Another reason could be the uncertainty of the jailbreak.
The iPhone Dev-Team has released PwnageTool 3.1.5 for Mac OS X. It allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to safely upgrade to firmware 3.1.3. With PwnageTool you can preserve jailbreak and ultrasn0w unlock. But if you’re using the blacksn0w unlock with baseband 05.11.07 you will need to stay at firmware 3.1.2.
PwnageTool 3.1.5 creates a custom 3.1.3 IPSW for the following devices:
iPhone 2G
iPhone 3G
iPhone 3GS with early bootrom
iPod touch 1G
iPod touch 2G with early bootrom
Warning! Don't try to use this tool if you have iPhone 3GS with firmware 3.1.3 - it just won't work. If you have iPod Touch 1G, iPhone 2G or factory unlocked iPhone 3G , try to use redsn0w - is would be much easier.
MuscleNerd, a member of the DevTeam, posted an interesting tweet. He claims that a new version of PwnageTool to jailbreak the Firmware 3.1.3 will be released soon.
However he also warns the owners of an iPhone 3G or 3GS, suggesting not rush for firmware update. In other words, the improvements of firmware 3.1.3 are minimal, so if you are comfortable with firmware 3.1.2 just stay with that.