Life is Full a Vit

Well I’ve been beta testing iPhone OS 3.0 on my 3G since it went beta months ago. I got to experience the ultimate crap that Beta 1 was and watch it mature into the complete OS that went public last week. Apple has finally implemented several long awaited features. I have to say, the copy & paste implementation is absolutely brilliant and I have yet to see any other mobile device do it better. Apple certainly took their sweet time on what is generally accepted as a “must have” feature.

Another feature that we have taken for granted is…. MMS. Again, Apple dragged their feet on this wonderful feature, but their implementation of it is, again, very elegant. I’m able to send and receive MMS and the functionality is implemented with grace. Snap a photo or use an existing one. Nice and easy… and all on AT&T’s network. Though supposedly they have to make “changes to their network” to support this update? Wonderful bullshit they are feeding to the public. Their iPhone SMS plans simply disable the ability to MMS. Way to go, corporate giant. No matter, if you’re creative you can get around AT&T’s bullshit.

Internet Tethering. Yes. I just said it. Apple has implemented internet tethering, and the implementation is much better than what PDAnet provides. Of course, AT&T is tight lipped about their support for this feature. They’ve said absolutely nothing one way or the other about this new functionality. I’ve had a chance to test internet tethering over USB and Bluetooth and it works great!

Do take note… AT&T iPhones do not even make it apparent that they have MMS & Internet Tethering at the moment… that is, unless you know how to update the carrier settings file on the device to “unlock” these features. I’m not going to say very much about how this is done since a simple Google search will tell you all about it.

But this isn’t the end! The iPhone Dev Team has been hard at work and very tight lipped about any exploits that may be in development while we were waiting for the new version of the OS

and phone to be released. RedSn0w has been updated to jailbreak every iPhone and iPodTouch device other than the 3GS (the new phone that was released). More details here: http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/126908912/redsn0w-in-june. I’ve tossed a few screenshots of my jailbroken device for your viewing pleasure. I definitely missed my Winterboard theme!

Last but not least… As long as your device can be jailbroken (only the 3GS can’t be as of this writing), you can unlock your device with the updated version of UltraSn0w! More info available here: http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/128573459/ultras-now. And that’s all I have for now.

Well… first the major bummer. And this should of been expected all along. The MMS feature is currently disabled on the phone and on the carrier side. I even called AT&T to bug them about it and their customer service reps had no clue 3.0 was even available to developers yet. I ran across a post on the Apple developer forums that stated the MMS feature was not considered a developer feature and its functionality was disabled. Lovely. However all the functionality is there. I’m sure you’ve already seen screenshots or videos of how it works (and it’s pretty slick), so just this one from me.

On to the other things of note… Landscape view of emails and MMS/SMS is a definite improvement and in my opinion was needed from the beginning. The orientation changes currently can be a bit buggy, with the keyboard sometimes not switching to landscape mode (maintains portrait mode when phone is in landscape). This glitch can be seen throughout the OS currently, including bookmarks in Mobile Safari. No big deal, this is a beta OS release.

The new Bluetooth functionality I haven’t played with. I never use Bluetooth anyway, but I would love to see Apple enable OBEX so I can do file transfers to the phone with my PC, as well as send contacts to my friends via Bluetooth. Maybe someday, huh?

On the developer side, the Push Notification framework is in place. Maybe I’ll start playing more with iPhone apps finally… Anyway, there are more things to note, I’m sure. Maybe on another day.

PS: This is amusing (Pwn2Own interview): Safari the easiest to exploit.

Is out! And look at this… I’m a registered Apple Developer. The SDK is downloaded, the MacBook Pro is updated. Time to figure out how to load this from the SDK (I’m sure it’s pathetically easy) and overwrite my Jailbroken 2.2.1. It looks like the Dev Team is already working on jailbreaking 3.0… so I shouldn’t have to deal with the locked firmware for too long… I hope.