Be Excellent To Each Other

Oh cool. My experience of phones is I got given one (well, two now) and pay a tenner every few months. But getting that thing w/o paying half a grand doesn't sound half bad.

I learn things here!

Yeah, I'd neglected to mention the bootleg MMS clients. There is no fix for the A2DP though. None of these things are deal breakers, I can use corded headphones, keep my old phone for GPS, etc. But the new model, in addition to 3G, is likely to have twice the flash capcity in it too it seems (there are leaked ads for a 32Gb iPhone floating around). We'll know in a few weeks.

And thoughtsilver, it's likely only free on a £35 a month contract and up. 35 * 18 = £630, so not a trivial commitment.

I fully expect there to be a new model out soon, because yeah, that's what Apple do. Of course, it'll be full whack when it does come out. Still, I need a new phone, as PAYG, and I was thinking of getting one more 'fancy' than usual. It not being 3G doesn't bother me in the least. So hoorah and stuff.

Unfortunately, my phone is being delivered to my parents's address (on Friday), and I had a mail an hour ago to essentially say "Don't forget we're going out all day Friday, so if you want us then you'll have to leave an answerphone message." Oh fucknuts.

No bluetooth worth a damn either, which is irritating.

[edit]No copy/paste? WTF?

This is probably a stupid question, but when you unlock an iphone, is that just so you can use another network's sim card in it?

If you wanted to use an existing (under contract, but obviously from a different phone) O2 sim card in an iphone, would it still need unlocking?

Sorry, I did say it was a stupid question.

Yup.

GRIM...'S OPINION OF THE IPHONE.
It's very girly. I don't mean that it's suited more for girls, I mean that it's rather like a very pretty secretary. She gets the stuff done and she's organised, but she'll only ever be a secretary. There's potential for so much more there, but currently all she does is handle your emails and calls and such. And, if you're honest with yourself, you employed her more for her looks than her skill.
It's an average phone with a killer UI, some good apps (email is very nice, for instance), some crippling problems (no copy/paste, bluetooth that only hooks up to headsets, no MMS, rubbish camera for a phone that slick) and a surprise or two (I found the 'iPod' section of it very clunky, for instance). If I had to choose a phone to impress other people with, the iPhone would be it. If I had to choose a phone for using as a phone (stroke office suite thing stroke email reader stroke etc), I'd chose an N95.
Is it worth £169? I'm not sure. One thing I am sure of - it's so close to being great that it hurts.

Do I have to do something to make that happen?
If I try and play something (the latest episode of the Apprentice, for instance) I get an error.

Are you connecting via wifi, or EDGE?

Wifi.

Well that fucks my theory then, sorry.

Does Quicktime work otherwise? (And can Quicktime on the iphone be updated?)

Where do I find that?

Hmmph, that should "just work". Seems that it doesn't for some people though, it may be due to the unlocking method. I'd suggest restoring it and re-unlocking it but maybe wait a while in case it's something else.

I'd say the wife can officially live without it

I can't get the swirlyMMS thing to find any pictures either, but never mind. I'll get there.

Hoorah, Carphone Warehouse have mailed me to say there's a problem with my order (which doesn't surprise me as I have tedious postcode issues due to infuriatingly life-complicating rezoning). So, I'll not be getting one... yet. I shall be keeping a close eye on Grim... and that wonderful tool he has in his palm.

Is activating and unlocking the iphone as easy as simply downloading iLiberty and running it?

Are there any extra things I need to do/obtain?

I can read through the forums at hackintosh and all that and work it out, but if someone has already sucessfully down it then i would really appreciate the distilled and condensed knowledge. Ta muchly, chums!

Give it a charge up (half an hour at least) with the plug-top charger first. Also, you should to deactivate the "itunes helper" app which runs (on the mac at least) and close itunes before connecting the iphone to the computer with the USB cable for the first time.

Then, yeah, just run it. I don't know what options iLiberty gives you but with iPLus, you just specified -u to do the unlock as well as the activate and jailbreak.

HTH!

CUS: go to a shop. Join usss.

Can't go to a shop - fucking Lloyds were supposed to send me a new PIN but they or the fucking Royal Mail have fucking fucked it up. This is the same reason why I was asking about Online Shopping...

Do you work in London?
If you do meet me at lunchtime with a handful of cash, and I'll buy it for you.

Watch out - CW keep a record of who buys the phones and there's a limit. The blokes in my shop said one each, but I actually think it's 5 or something like that. You'd find out anyway.

Cheers Kalmar, I'll give it a try tonight (picked up the phone yesterday, but too busy to try).

Small print at the bottom of the ads all over the free london papers said maximum 2 per customer. Wonder how they check (if they do) - if it's by card number or by name on the card or what....

Someone said you can't buy them with cash, somewhere. I think it was uk.rec.motorcycles.

#eadf802aed9b4f7a">http://groups.google.co.uk/group/uk.rec ... 2aed9b4f7a

You can't.

This is true, or at least it was in the o2 shop I went in. They refused to sell to the guy in front of me who had only cash. I asked the guy behind the till why they wouldn't ake cash, but he didn't give a reason - just "no cash, card only. Not solo or electron cards either".

Thinking about it, are they allowed to refuse cash?

They say they need the card to do a credit check. They won't let you buy the phone otherwise (to make sure you can afford the contract, presumably). I'm sure you could pay by cash if you also gave them a card to do the check on, but they do a pre-auth to make sure it's your card, so you need to know the PIN.

It does sound a bit fishy to be honest, and I don't think they do the check on the spot so I don't know what happens if you fail the check subsequently. I guess you end up with a phone you can't activate and bring it back within the 7 days for a refund.

And yeah, they're wanting to limit the number per customer, which is probably based on the billing address of your card. I don't think they could insist on it for that reason alone though.

No store is required to serve you, for any reason they like* I think.

*that doesn't get them into hot cakes with rights groups/laws.

Well, I watched the whole process at the Carphone Warehouse, and they didn't do anything like that.
Just used to card to make me pay with.
Thinking about it, there's no way they could do a credit check using a card.

Odd, they definitely used mine twice, the first time to do a pre-auth.

[/quote]

I dunno, that's what they said it was for. Maybe it's just to check your ID then.

When I tried to order one online, it mentioned some kind of 'Mobile history check' and said 'Your mobile rating will not be affected'

Mobile rating??

Grim... is right. You can't perform a credit check in the UK without three years of address history because that's what the Equifax and Experian computers want to ensure they know who you are.

This isn't a credit check, it's a "is-this-dude-buying-hundreds-of-iPhones-and-eBaying-them-to-China" check. They use the card details to ID you to their internal database so that they can do this check. This is where the "five phones per customer" limit comes from and also how it is enforced. There are hundreds of thousands of iPhones going overseas every month and Apple would very much like that to stop.

Anything else spouted by a CPW or O2 staff member is either uninformed bullshit or informed bullshit to cover up explaining that unlocking the iPhone is trivially easy.

Edit: forgot to add: there is no credit check at purchase time. If you settle down infront of iTunes to do the contract activation when you get home there is a credit check then, that comes with the usual string of questions. If you fail that you are entitled to return the phone for refund. Notably, this is the only circumstances under which a CPW will issue a refund on an iPhone; by law, on all contract phones, they are of course obliged to offer a 14 day cooling off period but as you buy the phone and the contact separately they cooling off period does not apply to the handset purchase. O2 and Apple will still offer full refunds though.

The other little thing I've noticed is that unlocked iPhones are still going on eBay for around £250.
Hmm...

Not for long, I'll wager.

Absolutely, I was just relaying what they said to me. As I mentioned they also told me it was "illegal" to "box break" the unit to work on another network so the rest is clearly suspect too. I believe they are definitely keeping track of how many you buy though, and the easiest way to do that is with a card.

They were going for about £380 at the time I bought mine.

Oh. Umm, in that case, I guess five minutes work with a piece of free software pays about £100. Blimey, Ebay buyers are dumb.
Aye, I concur.

From an ebay auction, my bolding:

I've just been to Carphone Warehouse.

3.5 minutes later, came out with an iPhone. Only had to give them my name and address, and pay the £169 on my credit card.

Now, 15 minutes later, after running iLiberty+ I have a fully unlocked iPhone running on Orange PAYG. Lovely.

Stop it you fuckers. I'm paid on Tuesday and I really want one of these and... nnngh.... there's... a... new... one... must... resist... near-obsolete...

Gah!

OH! OH!

Is this where y'all use those one-use disposable debit card thingies?

Edit - oops, sorry Richard.

If I'm already on an O₂ contract, can I simply bung in my SIM card? I'm very tempted by this.

Not unless you unlock it, out of the box it is totally locked down the SIM card it ships with. Once it is unlocked you can use any SIM you want.

See earlier answer on page 1

Oh, and Join usss.

Mentioned this to a guy at work who went straight out and bought one. A fraught half an hour later it's jailbroken, unlocked, activated and had its bootloader downgraded to 3.9.

Used iLiberty, but the first time I ran it the iPhone locked up. It kept booting into the BSD shell. Uh oh. Figured out how to get iTunes to restore the firmware, but that kept failing. Uh oh. It all suddenly, inexplicably, started restoring, though, and once that had finished iLiberty ran fine.

Phew.

If only I'd known it was so easy, I wouldn't have bought an unlocked one for mumble mumble pounds. Gahh.

Also, it looks like the damage done by ZiPhone (permanently downgrading to bootlloader 3.9) can now be undone by something called "BootNeuter". I'd still stick with iLiberty, though.

JOIN USSSS

Yes, after all, it only nearly bricked your colleagues iPhone once...

I have a feeling they may not acept those, but don't just take my word for it. There was a big sign in the shop saying "debit/credit cards only" and the guy said they won't take elecron or solo. I know next to nothing about the pre-pay cards.

They didn't ask me for any address details though.

Presumably if I wanted to I could go into shops and just buy loads, on different cards. I'm not going to, mind. I bought one to try, and if I don't like it it's going on ebay. Also, the wife was quite pissed off with me buying a new gadget when I'm trying to clear my credit cards off.

Just watched the "Pwned" video, which is the latest way to hack an iPhone. The app iself, that is, not the act of watching the video. Really clever - you install BootNeuter which patches the bootloader so you can switch between 3.9 and 4.6 (the latest). After that, you download the official iPhone software (IPSW 1.1.4), open it up in the Pwned application (Mac only), patch the *firmware*, then use the standard iTunes restore mechanism to jailbreak and unlock the phone by flashing it with the modified firmware.

The ZiPhone unlocker causes problems because, until BootNeuter came out (assuming I've read this properly and BootNeuter does actually fix the problem), ZiPhone irrevocably locked the bootloader to version 3.9 and only opening the phone up and attaching wires to it would fix it. BootLoader 3.9 works at the moment, but there's no guarantee it'll work when you upgrade to version 2 of the iPhone software (the one with the official app store that's in beta at the moment). iLiberty *doesn't* do this, and as the only other option is commandline-based, it seems like the way to go.

Hmmm, an iPhone would solve my phone and iPod problems in one fell swoop. I'm horribly tempted to ask Rich Uncle Barclaycard for one despite the somewhat pressing fact that I'm scratching around for pennies.

I'm doing this. Wish me luck!