August 6th, 2010 by admin

We recently posted the good? news that it is now legal to jailbreak our iPhones (under certain conditions). We also looked briefly at some of the pros and cons of jailbreaking our iPhones,  and some excellent posts have since appeared elsewhere on this issue.

One of the reasons that jailbreaking has been made legal is so that iPhone owners can access a wider range of service providers. The recent release of user satisfaction survey results by ChangeWaveResearch, for the Phone4 are particularly (though unintentionally) revealing on this matter. The survey results reveal that iPhone 4 owners are pretty happy with their iPhone 4. BUT that they are less than happy about the performance of their AT&T service provider. Consider the following graph, for example:

Dissatisfaction with AT&T are the top two reasons people gave for being unhappy with their iPhone 4 and make up 3 of the top four complaints. This issue is highlighted even more by the following graph, where it is clear that dropped calls are far more prevalent with AT&T than at other service providers and that the situation has been deteriorating for some time.

However, unless the iPhone is jailboken, iPhone owners are stuck with AT &T.

This must be raising some big questions at Apple. Because the last thing Apple wants is for users to jailbreak their iPhones. Their exclusive deal with AT&T has come back to bite them.  Because, clearly, the single biggest reason people have for considering getting their iPhones jailbroken is to get away from AT&T.

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July 30th, 2010 by admin

According to GeeksAreSexy.com, the latest decision handed down from the Copy Right Office, means that:

Jailbreaking your phone to use lawfully obtained software (i.e., you can put Google voice on your iPhone if you want to):

is now legal!

Does that mean you should go out and jailbreak your iPhone? Well, according to Google, 4 million people a month are thinking about it!. But there are disadvantages as well as advantages in jailbreaking your iPhone.

One of the main advantage of jailbreaking our iPhone is that we can use a different network provider (eg T-Mobile, etc). Another is that we can use non-Apple/iTunes  software.

The main disadvantage remains that Apple will disown us - our warranty may be void if we jailbreak our iPhone.

Still, its worth knowing that we can legally make the choice to jailbreak our iPhone if we want to!

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May 4th, 2010 by admin

Apple’s exclusive control over its platform has been touted as an anti-competitive strategy that has just been waiting to be challenged.

Most iPhone, iPod - and now iPad users could not care less, we suspect, about the fairness or otherwise of Apple’s actions. What we care about is the number, type and price of the apps. And, if you are like us, the most pressing change we would like to see is to the search-ability of iTunes!! And of course, about the quality of the iPhone or iPad itself!

After all, how would we even KNOW if the apps could be better or cheaper with more open competition, when we can’t even FIND most of them. There are now over 100,000 apps available for us iPhone users to download. And it seems as if just about anyone can get an app listed in iTunes on just about any subject (urinals for examples!). But finding out about the apps that we need is a lot more arduous than it needs to be. How can a company that has so much talent at both invention and innovation do this one thing so badly?

All the same its clear that some are unhappy about the Apple monopoly over its platform. The current war raging between Adobe and Apple is a case in point. But perhaps more significant are the people who get their iPhones, iPods and iPads unlocked and the talented developers who offer their considerable talent and valuable time for free so that people can do this. We refer, of course, to the iPhone dev team

And in case you think this is a minor group - consider that, according to Google, over 4 million people A MONTH search Google using keywords like iphone unlock, iPhone unlocked, 3g iphone unlock, 3g unlock - and so on. So a lot of interest! What’s more, according to Alexa, the Iphwn site (maintained by the iPhone Dev Team) is ranked at 14,335  - again this means that just this one site gets a huge following (over 750K visitors a month) with nearly a third of its visitors being American.

That’s a LOT of interest in unlocking or jailbreaking the iPhone, iPad or iPod. So the recent reports that the Federal Anti Trust body is looking at the Apple “monopoly” and may be about to challenge the way they control their iPhone and iPad development platforms is a sign that some of the concern out there is starting to get noticed!

Of course, there are a lot of passionate Apple supporters who don’t really care how Apple gets the results it does. After all, its only the results that count! Isn’t it?

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December 8th, 2009 by admin

We found out while researching a previous post that iPhone App theft has become so prevalent that significant % of iPhone Apps are lost through theft. This is what Pinch Media have found in their research:

Just over 60% of paid apps using Pinch have been pirated.  This estimate is also low, since application pirates occasionally disable our tracking.  When an application is pirated, an average of 34% of all installs are cracked — in other words, about half of legitimate paid downloads. 

This surprised us as most iPhone Apps are so cheap it does not seem worth the bother to steal them.  And, of course, an iPhone has to be unlocked or jailbroken for stolen iPhone Apps to be downloaded to them.

The team here at iPhonegizmo were curious to know what iPhone Apps were considered worth stealing, so we went on the hunt to find out! Here are our results:

1) Its not a case of which Apps - because pirates steal them in mass. So typically, a collection of Apps are offered in one download. For example, one iPhone download package is called “iPhoneteam megapack” and contains a whopping 967 stolen Apps!! The package contains a wide variety of Apps - probably most are not of any use to any one user, and they are not the current version on offer in iTunes.  They have a range of price at iTunes, but most are low. Selecting at random from the list, we found:

A Blackjack Card Counter (3.99), FIGHTER PILOT - Guns of War (3.99), 7 Chords ($1.99), Absolute Fitness (9.99)

2) The megapack was not the most popular download of stolen Apps. The Tom Tom Apps were! And this also surprised us, because these are big-price Apps. TomTom US & Canada, for example, sells for $99.99. The comment by one co-thief:

Thanks for saving me a hundred bucks!

The one consolation for the Tom Tom crowd might be the enthusiasm expressed by the people who steal the App - they say its great!

By far the best app out there!!! (nova71)

Awesome App !!!! ( pete0726)

Tom Tom Western Europe ($139.99) was a close second stolen iPhone App downloads. Navigon Europe ($94.99) was also a very popular App to steal, though the unhappy comments posted by downloaders for this App suggest that the stolen version does not work very well!

The message for Apple is very clear. A lot of people want a good navigation apps for their iPhones.

Our conclusion? - we think it would be a smart move for Apple to do a deal with TOM TOM and have a navigation App included as part of the standard package in any future versions of the iPhone.

(And BTW, we have not given links to any of the stolen Apps because we do not want to encourage anyone to jailbreak their iPhone. Also, we know that most developers struggle to just break even on the Apps they develop and we also reckon that anyone who can affords an iPhone can shell out the measly few $$ that most Apps cost!)

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November 25th, 2009 by admin

Unwittingly, the young geek that developed a bug that targets unlocked iPhones, may have just been doing Apple a big favor! After all, Apple have been trying everything in their considerable arsenal to stop people from jailbreaking their iPhones - including trying to make it illegal to jailbreak an iPhone.

Unfortunately for iPhone owners that have unlocked their iPhones,  the computer geek from Down Under released the code for his bug into cyber space. And now - mere weeks later -  another virus  has been developed, also attacking  iPhones that have been jailbroken.

The virus was identified by software security firm Sophos, which has named it “Duh” after a title identified in the software’s own source code. The company has warned jailbroken iPhone users to secure their devices. While the virus has apparently not yet been activated, infected phones are at risk of being used by hackers in order to gain private information, such as bank details, and use the phone’s broadband - possibly sending some user’s charges sky high.

It is not entirely clear how many  iPhones have been jailbroken.   Pinch Media stats (see below) suggest somewhere between 15 and 22% of iPhones have been jailbroken.

Now Pinch Media provide a lot of statistics for App developers - so that they (the developers) can keep tabs on downloads of their Apps from iTunes.  As a result, they  have been able to show that many Apps are being pirated (see our next post for more on this). But they are also able to show how many iPhones that are downloading Apps, have been unlocked.

Clearly, the number of iPhones that have been jailbroken are a significant thorn is the side of Apple - as they represent potentially lost customers from their iTunes store.

So, as we said at the start, these new bugs may be a problem for people with jailbroken iphones, but they may well be throwing parties over at Apple!

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November 9th, 2009 by admin

Attention all those with a jail broken iPhone! If you have also installed SSH, without changing the default password, then you might be in for trouble.

Because a smart alec Aussie computer geek has gone and created the first iPhone worm (and called it ikee) - and he has been able to do this by targeting of a weakness in the SSH iPhone software - us, the users! Why? Because apparently, not changing the password is:

is the digital equivalent to installing a new door on your house and hanging the key to the lock from the door handle.

And the problem is that SSH is appealing because it allows users to remotely connect to their phone via the internet. So its likely that a large percentage of Australian jail broken iPhones are vulnerable to the worm.

You will know you have the worm if you discover that your iPhone’s  wallpaper has been changed to a picture of British 80’s icon Rick Astley with the accompanying message: “ikee is never going to give you up.”

According to Towns, the worm was created as a practical joke rather than malice. But, as Towns has released the full source code for four different variants, there is the possibility that the worm will spread from Australia! So if you have a jail broken iPhone and have also installed SSH, then you need to change your password, pronto. F-Secure has posted instructions on how to change the root password.

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September 19th, 2009 by admin

The iPhonegizmo team have researched and posted about the reasons many people have for unlocking their iPhones (here, for example).  And about how Apple has worked hard to try and stop unlocking! And we introduced you to the iPhone Dev Team, (a group of hackers who develop software for iPhone users so that they can use applications unauthorized by Apple on their iPhones). They provide a free open source iPhone hack (unlock software).

Well, the iPhone Dev Team have been issuing guidelines (aka - warnings) for iPhone owners that want to keep their iPhones unlocked, to NOT install Apple’s firmware updates:

if you want to keep the jailbreak or unlock on your 3GS, you should resist all urges to install Apple’s official firmware updates without knowing if a jailbreak exists for that version yet.

In fact, the Dev Team warn that updating to the latest OS version (iPhone OS 3.1) will destroy the redsn0w unlock.

But, it seems that the new PwnageTool 3.1 just  released “THIS DOES NOT SUPPORT THE 3GS OR 2G/3G IPOD TOUCH” Apparently the latest Apple firmware is tougher to unlock - so the fix is promised for “some time in the near future”.

This leaves iPhone owners with a real dilemma -  is independence from iTunes worth the risk of not updating to the latest firware? We will leave you with the warning listed at softpedia:

Using hacks may render your device unusable, or may reduce the quality of your experience using the respective device. If you choose to download and install jailbreak tools, you will do so at your own risk. Unlocking / jailbreaking your iPhone / iPod touch may violate your warranty or the EULA with Apple and / or your cellular service provider.

OUCH!

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