Not all is bad about the iPhone 4 though. The screen is amazing, tantalizing, fabulous, ridiculously fantastic and I might just have ran out of adjectives to describe how "real" it feels to look at such a screen. It's like there's no screen at all and you're just looking at something "real". If you've read my blog, you'll know that by now I loathe Steve Jobs. He's an arrogant prick who bullies his employees and he might as well have been the one who gave the order to go ahead with this design, despite having been warned about the issues it could have. Still, the screen of the iPhone 4 is just... fantastic. It's something that has to be seen in person to be wooed by it and trust me, you will be.

Anyway, enough beating the dead horse with a stick and moving on to more serious matters. I've had my eye on the Samsung Galaxy S for a while now and based on the reviews and videos I saw of it, I was pretty much convinced on getting one. I had a few deals on eBay that I was keeping track of  and I was just waiting for my own phone to sell to then buy the Galaxy. However, what was not my surprise when on the O2 store, I saw the Samsung Galaxy S for sale and it had actually been one of the motives for me to go up to the store: I wanted to try the phone in person just to get the feel of it. I asked the lady if she had one other than that one on display as it had no battery and she went to get one, a BNIB handset, just for me to try. I was impressed with her amiability with this and I had the chance to take a glance at the price tag - £319 it read. I thought to myself that it was a really nice price but it was probably locked to O2, which isn't desirable at all for me. I'm at a point in my life that I might have to move to God knows where and having a phone that's locked to a British network is anything but ideal for me.

The lady came back with the handset and she let me mess around with it a bit. I tried (and failed) to enable Swype, and on a casual chit chat with the O2 lady, I asked her whether the phone was locked and she told me she didn't actually know. Those phones were supposed to be sold on contracts and those are usually unlocked, but she didn't know. She also told me that she was fairly sure they were unlocked, as the box had no O2 branding whatsoever, but she didn't know for sure. After asking a few of her colleagues, none of them seemed to be sure either but at some point, one of them assured me it was unlocked to all networks, and I just knew it: I have to buy this phone. And I did. I made an excellent deal, better than any of the deals on eBay because I get 1 year warranty and in the end it's actually cheaper than anything on eBay.

So, to everyone who's wanting to buy a Samsung Galaxy S, I say try your local O2 shop. Maybe they have a few units like this!

Apple released the iPhone 4 and dubbed it as the best smartphone ever. It was the best smartphone Apple had ever built, it was the best smartphone on Earth and... "there's one more thing... look at the rim. This is also the antenna and is part of some brilliant engineering." (this is more or less what Steve Jobs preached at the iPhone launch). When making this presentation, little did Jobs know (or didn't he?) that this antenna design was going to backfire so gracefully, like a Russian Roulette player who's about to fire the gun against his head for the sixth time in a row. And it did fire.

Jobs can bullshit us all he likes, with statistics and with supposed facts that the iPhone 4 only drops 1/100th more calls than the 3GS but fact remains: the iPhone 4 has a massive flaw that was overlooked by Apple's engineers. This flaw hit all sorts of media. It was on technology websites, on mainstream newspapers and it even hit some TV channels like CNN. Moreover, Consumer Reports in the US went from recommending the iPhone 4 to NOT recommending it at all when they found out (and tested for themselves) about this issue with the reception. After all this bad publicity, after AAPL's shares dropping roughly $30 per share, Jobs knew something had to be done. And so he did, he called for a press conference and they approached the issue of the antenna... in one of the worst ways possible.

At the conference, Jobs' claim was that all smartphones have this issue. Conveniently, they played videos of other phones being grasped firmly in a hand and of how the bars would go all the way down. Conveniently, they were videos. They weren't showing it live, the tests weren't even being done in one of the anechoic chambers that Jobs' claimed to have spent $100 million on to test their phones; it was just someone, holding a series of phones, connected to God knows what operator, and showing how the bars go down. What Apple failed to address however, was the fact that you don't need the so-called 'death grip' to get the bars to drop. All you need to do is bridge the two antennas on the bottom-left corner of the phone. Place your finger on top of it and your call quality will drop dramatically, to a point where the call might disconnect and to a point where you'll have no reception at all. Apple's response, in sum, was: all phones have this problem, the iPhone is not perfect, but here's a bumper anyway to keep you quiet.

Jobs. If you are so confident that the iPhone 4 has no problem at all, why are you giving your customers bumpers that fix the problem? What, wait. But there is no problem, is there? Is there a problem that affects all phones and thus you are appeasing the customers with a solution or is there no problem at all. I'm confused now.

In any case Jobs, I understand you. After the shit's been done you really can't admit to it anymore. You'd take another massive hit to the shares of AAPL and that's bad for business. You also can't do a global recall because that would mean replacing every single iPhone 4 by new models without the issue and that would mean catastrophic losses plus a massive stain on Apple's history. So all in all Jobs, well done. You took the sensible way out. Not the way out that truly has your customers at heart but the way out that is best for everybody.

Below is the image that people will see when they try to download Flash on their iPhones (courtesy of Engadget):

You have been warned, be safe, buy a Palm Pré.

[via Engadget]

]]> http://www.tiagoespinha.net/2009/07/iphone-virus-avast/feed/ 0 http://www.tiagoespinha.net/2009/06/iphone-30-jailbreak-and-ultrasn0w-it-is-out/ http://www.tiagoespinha.net/2009/06/iphone-30-jailbreak-and-ultrasn0w-it-is-out/#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:37:15 +0000 tiago http://www.tiagoespinha.net/?p=212 It might be old news for some, but I am sure that not everyone is aware of this yet.

The good folks at the iPhone Dev Team did it again and after some days that just seemed too long, they released the new tool called redsn0w. This tool is meant to jailbreak the iPhone 3G only, and only with the firmware 3.0 - jailbreak for the 3GS still hasn't been released but since the flaw seems to exist in the 3G, it should only be a matter of days (and of the Dev Team getting their hands on a 3GS - feel free to chip in) until the jailbreak is released.

The process is pretty simple, just update to 3.0 normally through iTunes and when that's done, search for the correct IPSW in the following folder (if you're using Vista or 7):
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPhone Software Updates
(For XP, search around the Application Data folders under Documents and Settings)

When you have this file, just feed it to redsn0w and follow the steps. In under 5 minutes you should be running a jailbroken 3.0.

After this is done, if you also want to operator-unlock your phone, you'll need ultrasn0w. This is the replacement for the long-lived yellowsn0w. In case you weren't aware of this fact, the new baseband has a hole again, which allows for it to be hacked. This way, we can all use different operator SIM cards without a problem.

To install ultrasn0w, you simply need to add the repo http://repo666.ultrasn0w.com and then search and install the application ultrasn0w on Cydia. Reboot your phone, and you're done. It really is THAT easy!

So what are you waiting for? Go for it!