A number of iPhone 3G owners are reporting the appearance of hairline cracks in the plastic finish of the phone. According to threads on Mac Rumors forums and Apple’s Discussion Boards, the cracks appear to be manifesting mostly in the white 16GB version of the phone; however, Engadget notes this may be due to the fact that the cracks are easier to see in the white model than the black (see photo below). Importantly, iPhone owners experiencing the issue report that the cracks appear without the device being dropped, sat on, or misused in any way. It is unclear what might be causing the problem, or how widespread the issue is.
The big winners in Apple's new online App Store are gamemakers, who dominated sales in the week since the new iPhone 3G hit stores.
Seven of the top 10 paid applications, including the top five, were video games, led by Sega's Super Monkey Ball, a rolling racing game. Even among the free iPhone and iPod Touch applications, which include popular social networking sites like Facebook and the Internet radio service Pandora, the top title is Tap Tap Revenge, a rhythm game similar to Guitar Hero.
These 10 titles sold the best in the iTunes App Store:
DevTeam posted a new interesting screenshot. They successfully downgraded modem firmware. This is not an unlock (yet), but it is a good illustration of the first progress made with regard to hacking the 3G baseband. They accomplished this by being able to execute their own code on the baseband that allows to circumvent security checks and flash the baseband with older, disallowed firmware. Please note this has been accomplished using software only, the iPhone 3G has not been disassembled or hardware modified in any way.
Apple is already providing developers with a new iPhone firmware beta with enhanced location-finding that could lead to true navigation as well as the roots for background push services.
The one of new features is update to core Location - it can now recognize the cardinal direction of an iPhone with GPS as well as its velocity, both of which are ingredients necessary to providing turn-by-turn directions. The additions confirm statements recently by Apple's Greg Joswiak, who rejected earlier claims that iPhone 3G's GPS antenna wasn't powerful enough to handle navigation and in turn explained that "complicated issues" are holding the device back from serving as a true navigation unit.
Apple is also implementing a rough version of its background push notification service in the 2.1 firmware. Announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference, the feature lets third-party native programs receive data such as alerts or new messages without actively running. The measure saves processing power without interrupting some apps that depend on constant access to the Internet.
The inclusion of this early version of the code alludes to the 2.1 update becoming public at the same time as the push notification service itself, which is tentatively due for September. In the meantime, Apple and its US partner AT&T are known to be testing iPhone 2.0.1, a maintenance release that likely fixes some of the outstanding bugs with the initial 2.0 release.
BossPrefs is a very popular allpication. Now there is BossPrefs v2.0.2a that works with 2.0 fimware. It can be installed via Cydia Installer.
This is the first working version for 2.0 devices. There will be some issues but the major stuff should work. The airplane / phone toggles are not implemented, the add plugin GUI is not implemented, and there may be some other minor issues. The bulk of it works. Update will be very soon, but we can use this version right now.
Couple words and screenshots for those, who are not familiar what this application is for:
Thanks to Dev Team and the porting work of Jay Freeman as well as the authors of 3Proxy, it is now possible to "tether" your iPhone 3G and use its Internet connection on your laptop.
Warning - Tethering your iPhone is against the iPhone data plan terms. AT&T could slap you with huge fees if you overuse this. I recommend only using it during emergencies.
Here is a basic plan (by the way, this should work for old IPhone also):
After successfull jailbreake of the IPhone/IPhone 3G with firmware 2.0 it is possible to install Cydia installer. And what is more exciting, there are many applications there, including Java.
The development sources for xpwn 0.3, the firmware 2.0 version of our cross-platform jailbreaking library/command-line utility have been pushed onto github. DevTeam tested it on Linux, Windows XP, and Windows Vista for both the iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G thus far, but since it uses the same FirmwareBundles files as PwnageTool, and we know those work for the iPod touch, there ought not be any problems.
Being a suite of command-line utilities, this release is meant primarily for developers. While you can certainly jailbreak (both 3G and first-gen) and unlock (first-gen) with it, it's not really something you want to try without reading the lengthy, detailed README. If you don't have the patience to do that, this release is not for you.
For users this news mean that quite soon there will be a new version of winpwn, supporting 2.0.
There is not much defference between Safari 1.1.4 and 2.0. But Under the hood, MobileSafari 2.0's performance is hugely improved over 1.1.4. Everything related to web surfing feels faster, web pages consistently load faster on 2.0, both via Wi-Fi and EDGE. This has nothing to do with the new iPhone 3G hardware — this is about dramatic performance improvements on original iPhones upgraded to the 2.0 OS.
Using MobileSafari simply feels faster, especially with web applications. Feel is by nature subjective, but JavaScript benchmarks back this up.
In August last year, Craig Hockenberry posted a few simple benchmarks to compare the iPhone's processing power and JavaScript interpreter against Safari 3 running on a Mac with a 1.83 GHz Core Duo. At that time, the current version of the iPhone OS was 1.0.1. Here are the results of those same benchmarks on original iPhones running the 1.1.4 and new 2.0 OS versions, with Hockenberry’s 1.0.1 results included for comparison:
Test
1.0.1
1.1.4
2.0
Vs. 1.0.1 / 1.1.4
100,000 iterations
3.209
1.096
0.145
22× / 8×
10,000 divisions
0.413
0.181
0.029
14× / 6×
10,000 sin(x) calls
0.709
0.373
0.140
5× / 3×
10,000 string allocations
0.777
0.434
0.133
6× / 3×
10,000 function calls
0.904
0.595
0.115
8× / 5×
The last column shows how many times faster the 2.0 version of MobileSafari was versus 1.0.1 and 1.1.4. The same results, charted (smaller bars are faster) can be viewed above.
The results are obvious. WebKit JavaScript performance has improved steadily and significantly in just one year, with a huge jump between 1.1.4 and the new 2.0.0. In side-by-side page loading tests between two original iPhones running 1.1.4 and 2.0.0, the new version consistently finished at least a few seconds faster.
For all the hubbub regarding the new App Store, most “iPhone software” runs in the web browser. But improvements in WebKit performance often help native iPhone app performance, too — a slew of my favorite native iPhone apps have built-in WebKit browsers (e.g., NetNewsWire, Twitterrific, Instapaper, and Cocktails). When WebKit performance improves, any app that uses WebKit improves, and WebKit improved a lot between iPhone 1.1.4 and 2.0.0.
Russian newspaper Vedomosti investigated how much the new IPhone 3G costs in Russia, country where users cannot buy IPhone officially. The results are impressive.
Several russian web sites offer IPhone 3G 8Gb for $1200. Rumors say that In Moscow it is possible to find one foe $775, but it is not easy. However $1200 is not the limit at all. In some big shopping center in Moscow one can buy IPhone 3G for $3449.
Some analysts report, that there are about 400,000 IPhones in Russia. Every month this number increases by approximately 33,000.
iRinger creates free ringtones for your iPhone from virtually any music or video file you own. Even YouTube videos! iRinger exports ringtones to iTunes, so there is no need to "jailbreak" your iPhone. You will be creating ringtones in seconds. It's that simple. Here is a video tutorial:
Feature:
FREE
Three Steps: Import, Preview then Export. Done.
Convert virtually any audio format into an iPhone ringtone
Extracts audio out of video
Choose which section of the audio you want to hear
Adjust ringtone length,volume, fade in, fade out and loop gap
Export to iPhone ringtone format and import right into iTunes
Export to iPhone using SCP/SFTP and skip using iTunes
Use audio effects: Delay, Flanger, Boost, Reverse, etc.
Runs on all versions of Microsoft Windows including Windows Vista
Requires iPhone firmware 1.1.2 or newer, iTunes software 7.5 or newer
With the iPhone 3G not even ten days old, virtually all of the Apple retail store stores open within the United States are without any examples of the device to sell on July 21st.
The shortage is severe enough in the 38 states that claim Apple stores that it's easier to count the locations that do have iPhone 3G units than those that don't.
In California, the only Apple store with any iPhones is the Pleasanton store with only 16GB black examples, while New York City's Fifth Avenue store is the only one in all of New York state known to have any examples left, with just 16GB white models in stock.
Only a single Honolulu store and the Salem, New Hampshire store can also claim to have any units available, and each only lists one model as ready for Monday.
Apple has been continually resupplying its stores with new iPhones - in many cases on a daily basis - but has seen fewer and fewer of its stores touting next-day availability in the several days since the July 11th debut of the handset upgrade.
Whether or not Apple's supply will meet demand in time to prevent a repeat of May's complete stockout is also far from certain. When grilled on an unprecedented spike in preorders, Britain's iPhone carrier O2 said it might take "some weeks" before it could satisfy enough of its customers on a regular basis.
Now older IPhone users users can upgrade to firmware 2.0 and IPhone 3G users have a possibility to have jailbreaked IPhones. That is because PwnageTool 2.0 is released today. Download links are: mirror1, mirror2, mirror3.
Just a reminder: this tool jailbreaks and unlocks older iPhones, and jailbreaks iPhone 3Gs and iPod Touches. No unlock for Iphone 3G yet. The supported firmware is 2.0 only. Platform is Mac OS.
If you get Error 1600 from iTunes (or if you see in your log a failure to repare x12220000_4_Recovery.ipsw), try: mkdir “~/Library/iTunes/Device Support” ; if that directory already exists, remove any files in it. Then re-run PwnageTool.
Reminder: as of right now, there are no apps out for 2.0. Over the next few days some will come out. So do not update yet if you have some favorite 1.1.x apps you are using! 2.0 will not run 1.1.4 apps