Be Excellent To Each Other

But doesn't.

I stopped by Carphone Warehouse today, explained my situation and asked for suggestions.

Unfortunately, the bloke spent more time trying his best to appear Very Arrogant Indeed (while simultaneously not knowing half the technical terms being thrown around until the other, idle salesbloke explained them) and basically saying that I'm stupid for wanting a 16Gb iPhone, and further that I AM WRONG to not just chop my music collection in half so it will fit in 8Gb.

I barely got a look at the Viewty phones as he was more determined to do me a deal of a Samsung slide phone (which I didn't want) and an iPod Classic.

After it almost turned into my shouting at him that I was fed up with being told 'do you really want all of your music collection' (YES, I FUCKING DO) for the twentieth time, I did my best to make my polite excuses and leave.

I am extremely reluctant to ever deal with CPW again. Even if I was making a slightly silly request/suggestion (I really do want to have all my music collection on SOMETHING that isn't my hard drive, and suggested that perhaps a combination of phone and iPod would work better) I really felt like they were taking the piss with a constant undertone that I was some sort of foolish ignoramus and didn't really want my whole music collection after all and was a big stupid idiot for wanting a 16Gb iPhone or a LG KF700 + iPod when what I really obviously should have wanted was a Samsung slide-y-moving-parts-break-o-shit or a Nokia N95.

Tossers. Was that Nick's store? Mind you, Nick tries to cram an N95 down my throat every time I talk to him too. Also: if you have your heart set on a 16Gb one (I understand why etc) I urge you to wait a few weeks and see if the 3G one brings with a size bump to 16Gb/32Gb. If it does you'll get a better deal. Because of the price cut on the 8Gb model the 16Gb one really is expensive at the moment.

Yes, it was Nick's store, I specifically went down there hoping to speak to him, but, not wanting to seem a twat, put my queries to his colleagues when they informed me he wasn't in today.

Perhaps they were sale-hungry or something, as they kept saying 'the £100 discount on 8Gb ones could end any day now' and the bloke I was speaking directly to kept offering me a deal to buy the crappy Samsung phone and he'd knock varying amounts of cost off a 80Gb iPod Classic.

He also reckoned that the 3G one would still be a case of 8Gb and 16Gb... but at least admitted he could be wrong about that.

Anything that doesn't fall into the category of "What gives the salesman the most commission" IS a silly suggestion, of course.

I had fun with the salesbod by pretending that I knew nothing about the iPhone, so I could hear all his entertaining lies. He looked so smug as he handed the phone over - obviously thinking of whatever commission / bonus he'd get from the hideous £35 a month contract. Ha!

Anyway, I've just got it working over GPRS on Orange Pay-as-you-go, and the likelihood of it ever going in Ebay has diminished to almost nothing.

I only know one of the other guys in there... Matt, I think. Chunky fellow. Blonde hair I think.

Ends June 1st. This is plastered all over the O2 site. Hmm, as you say, maybe they are at the end of the month and low on quota.

He could be right. My thinking runs like this: if they want to put the price back to £269 they will have to offer a significant upgrade now over the £100 off price. (If they don't put the price back up the iPod Touch remains a terrible deal). Just upgrading to 3G isn't a significant upgrade in itself; it's too hard to explain the advantages, and the advantages are too intangible. This is not a very Apple way. My money is on it getting a storage bump as well so it's a clear upgrade that everyone can immediately see why it's better. This is just a hunch though.

This may be wrong if the £169 price point becomes a permanent price. In any event, you are unlikely to lose out by waiting.

The guy who has ticked me off so was from the Indian subcontinent. His mate was a little strawberry blond chap. While they did make some valid points (try re-encoding your music as AAC if space is at a premium, which is an interesting idea) the rest of the time they made me feel rather foolish for wanting what I wanted.



I actually said this to them, and they maintained maybe sooner.



This is true. They confirmed that the upgrade doesn't expire. So I may well just go straight to O2 if I want an iPhone, or just dump both O2 and CPW and go to another shop or network.

Where's your willpower, sir?

As for the 3G iPhone, I'll be amazed if the capacity isn't bumped.

Well, mine is now jailbroken, activated and unlocked, hoorah!

Still can't get it to talk to my Windows machine, but on my Mac, using iLiberty, it's all go baby! Woo! WOOOO! Impressed that I can still tootle around and watch/do stuff without a SIMM. That is, I'm glad there's no insane 'Meh, no SIMM I won't turn on' fault.

I am going to have to start frequenting places with free wi-fi more often, now, fo' sho'. This might be of use to someone.

When I ran iLibertyX on my Mac, it put the iPhone into recovery mode, but then sat for oh, at least half an hour whilst 'Preparing Jailbreak'. I suppose it was downloading and installing. But it still did nothing even when 'Executing Jailbreak'. This made me then restart my iPhone, hoping to repeat the process. Nope, it was now stuck in recovery mode, quite dead. Uh-oh. Nothing would recognise it. Here's how to fix this:

Hold down 'Home' and 'Power' to turn off the iPhone. Make sure it's connected to your computer, and the latest iTunes is installed but closed. Hold down 'Home' and 'Power' again, whilst counting to 10. Then let go of 'Power' whilst still pressing 'Home'. Wait. Within a minute you should see iTunes load up, and you should get the option to restore your iPhone's firmware. Do so.

I did this then repeated the process and that time, it was all good. Hoorah! It really is *very* nice. I'm impressed at how well the 'typing' works, very clever stuff.

You can also take out one SIM and put an entirely different one in, all with the device still switched on (as I did without thinking when I first got mine) and it doesn't go all mental. It acknowledges the removal of SIM 1 and within a few seconds of putting SIM 2 in, the new network logo pops up and you're away.

I love the fact you don't have to switch it off to go into ("Aeroplane" - English Ed) Mode either. In fact, apart from the stupidity of not having a proper MMS facility, I haven't got much to complain about.

iSquint is free. I would think it's worth trying first before spending. It put "But I'm a Cheerleader" onto my iPod, and seemed ok.

I can't get an iPhone I was lured by one of those N95 things and ended up with an 18 month O2 contract for 600 minutes and 600 texts. My last bill said I used 17 minutes and 6 texts.

You can still use your O2 sim in a new iPhone.
You're way better off with the N95 though, IMO.

Well, yes. I mean I already will have thrown £800 or something on this thing for no sensible reason.

How does one remove the SIMM though? It looks like I have to stick a pin in there, which seems daft.

You do. Stick a pin in, lean it one way or the other, and pull it out again. I spent a while trying to push a catch with the pin that wasn't there.

Official Apple SIM-removal paperclip.

That's amazing.

So, I caved and bought one.

Using ILiberty, the phone went into an endless boot error, which I am now attempting to fix by downloading the restore software through iTunes.

This is a lot harder than I thought it would be.

I know it goes against the grain, but I had no trouble at all with ZiPhone.

Mr. Russ, I went through the same thing, I think. Read my post about it, I fixed it happily. I'd dig it out but for approaching boss of grumpiness.

Exactly the same here -ZiPhone has never given me any trouble at all. I've even managed to use that BootNeuter thhing to restore the bootloader to an unlocked version 4.6, which is apparentely one of the big problems with ZiPhone.

Hmm, with iPlus it said up front that you had to restore the phone to a known version (1.1.4) *before* attempting to unlock. Are you guys doing that, I mean, does iLiberty not say the same?

I don't know how you guys cope with the stress of modding these things. I remember the day we soft-modded my XBox, I was almost having kittens thinking it was about to break.

:clenched buttocks:

You should've been there the day I thought I'd bricked my Xbox then. I felt literally sick...

Fixed the bugger in the finish though!

Another chap at work got an iPhone, and it did the same thing for me. That's two now that I've iLiberty hacked. It goes like this:

- Plug in iPhone
- iTunes launches
- Run iLiberty
- Select the four tickbox options on the main iLiberty page
- Click "Free my 8GB iPhone"
- iLiberty gets to the point where it says something about the jailbreak process and the progress bar stops progressing.

At this point, you need to go off track a bit and restore the 1.1.4 firmware. I think if you could get the 1.1.4 firmware restored first, you wouldn't need to do this. Anyway. There are probably a few steps here that are unnecessary, but this sequence has worked for me twice now:

- Quit iLiberty (you may need to force quit)
- Unplug the dock cable
- Switch off the iPhone
- Switch on the iPhone - text should start streaming up the screen
- Wait until you get the same BSD message (something something 0 something 2 something 0 something) printing repeatedly
- Plug in the iPhone
- Hold down the home button and the power button until it switches off, switches on, and the "plug me in" picture appears
- Load iTunes if it isn't loaded already
- Allow it to restore the latest firmware (this takes a while - the firmware is about 170MB)

Once this has finished, the iPhone is back to the standard unjailbroken state.

- Load iLiberty again
- Select the four tickboxes again
- Click the "Free my 8GB iPhone" again

The unlock process will now go without a hitch. Takes about 5 minutes.

Correct. You can get the iPhone restored to 1.1.4 without using iLiberty by putting the iPhone into recovery mode before plugging it in. Start iTunes, then turn off the iPhone completely, then hold down the home button (one at the bottom) and plug it in to the computer. Only let go of the home button once you get the "connect to iTunes" image on the phone.

iTunes will pick it up and ask you to restore it, which it will then do - up to 1.1.4.

You can then use iLiberty at your leisure.

Cor. ZiPhone goes like this:
- Plug in iPhone
- iTunes launches
- Run ZiPhone
- Press the big button marked 'do everything' or something
- Wait
- You're done

The process GazChap described is exactly what I did and it worked fine. I'm concerned enough about the bootloader messing around that ZiPhone does that I will stick to iLiberty for all future phones... of which there may be a few, as I seem to be fielding a lot of questions about the iPhone of late.

Yes, it should basically be one click as long as you've restored it first.

Grim: Clearly it's easy to use, but there's more than a few tales of the ziphone author basically being a bit non-excellent, which made me want to avoid it on principle (as well as the bootloader thing. And the reports of various things mysteriously not working afterwards). That's why I was warning about it, but everyone's free to make their own mind up.

Hey, I'm not trying to push a method onto anyone, I'm just sharing my experience. Quite glad I don't have to do it again, TBH

Do elaborate.

ZiPhone seems to force a downgrade of the bootloader on the iPhone, from 4.6 (which is seems to be the current one) to 3.9. At the moment this seems to be irreversible I think, although Zio up there ^^^ said that he managed to sort it using BootNeuter.

Also, ZiPhone works differently; it loads a large ramdisk into the iPhone and boots that ramdisk. This contains all the bits to unlock and activate the iPhone. However, this is constrained to 32Mb, and my reading suggests that under large file transfer the iPhone memory controller can start flipping bits at random. iLiberty on the other hand loads a very minimal ramdisk and puts a much larger transfer into the flash memory part of the iPhone (i.e. the music storage bit). The devs claim this is more reliable (I have no view on this) and that it lets the ramdisk be much bigger and hence can contain more stuff (certainly, there are loads of extra packages the iLiberty installer lets you put on at the same time).

Yes, iLiberty uses a 2 pass method to avoid overloading the RAM's 32 bits (or something) so you can never brick it. ZiPhone, you can maybe brick it.

I did indeed fix my problem by following CUS' (and subsequently GazChap's) advice about teh repeating error message.

The problem was not reading a tutorial which said "Stick it in iTunes to restore the firmware first."

Oh, Now that I have the Cydia installer, it's telling me that there's about 40 changes. Should I just go ahead and say yes to all the upgrades?

Looks like you guys caused a rush...

JesusPhone Phamine

"Both suppliers' websites are current flagging the handset as "out of stock" (CW) and - more ominously - "no longer available" (O2)."

The shops have still got them, though. One of the guys who bought one found that he couldn't get a signal anywhere. Tried swapping the SIM into mine and it worked fine, so there was something wrong with the phone. One hour, 3 different Crapphone Whorehouses and 3 arguments later and he's got a replacement that works properly. Fortunately they hadn't run out of stock.

iXboxLive is a brilliant little application that shows your friends' gamer cards and status. You have to add them manually rather than it pulling down your full friends list, but to be honest that suits me fine as I have 70-odd people on it.

I'll just put my BezziestMates on it and it means I can see what they're doing even when I'm in the pub!

Wait, that's a bit sad.

Yeah, like anyone would ever take you to the pub.

You are this guy and ICMFP.

What's your score?

Finally going up now that I've got some new games and stopped trying to wring the last few drippings out of older ones.

*blink* Wrong thread mate, or are you saying you're going buy an iPhone on the cheap, like us?

If so, I have some bad news. They're no longer available. I think this is a 'permanent' thing (the deal expires at the end of this month anyway).

He was answering my question.

Oh ho!

http://www.icontrolpad.com/

A joypad thingy that you can plug your iPhone into. ZodTTD's emulators already support it, apparently.

Sweet! I hope they make it into production.

I've managed to get mp3 ringtones working now, so another reason to hate the iPhone has gone.