Get-rich-quick iPhone schemes not paying off
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Blog: We've already seen that waiting in line for an iPhone wasn't really necessary. As a result, the profit margins aren't too great.
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Hackers have figured out how to unleash Apple's iPhone from AT&amp;T's cellular network, but people hoping to make money from the procedure could face legal problems.
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Remember a couple of weeks ago when Steve Jobs took the stage and announced a $200 cheaper iPhone. That was pretty bad. And an iPhone that's just an iPod. Who needs that! The new Nano sure is cute, but cute insn't enough. I have a 1.5 year old 60GB video iPod that still works (sorry Steve) and I never use the video, so the $300 I have burning a hole in my pocket for my monthly Apple impulse buy (above and beyond the new Mini I bought last week) is going to (drum roll please) Nokia!  Yup, my next iPod/iPhone-alike thingy isn't even from Apple and it runs Linux, and comes highly recommended by geeks everywhere. I just put in the order on Amazon, I'll let you know how cool it is in a few days.  PS: This is my way of thanking Ben Bernanke for the huge windfall I got in the stock market yesterday and today. I think the 1/2 percent drop in interest rates is supposed to make us go out and buy stuff to stimulate the economy. Just doing my part Uncle Ben!
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There's more to gain than lose from the upcoming iPhone.
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Apple updated iTunes to keep users from creating free iPhone ringtones--a workaround has already been posted.
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âThe iPhone makes me mad,â proclaims Peter Svesson (AP Technology Writer). âNot, mind you, at the iPhone itself, but mad at cell-phone manufacturers who have saddled us for years with interfaces that lure us into labyrinths of menus.â Unlike cell phones with buttons that âcan mean âBackâ on one screen, âCancelâ on another, [and] âExitâ on a third,â iPhone âhas one button on its face. It always does the same thing: takes you to the top menu, where icons representing all functions of the phoneâmusic player, Internet browser and moreâare laid out in a clear manner. Wham, youâre out of the labyrinth.â That, Svensson laments, is âthe way it always should have been done.â
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People looking to walk into an Apple retailer and buy an&#160;iPhone&#160;with cash will be out of luck. The company is now accepting only credit or debit card payments for the devices so they can track who purchases the phone, according to an employee at the Apple Store in New York&#39;s SoHo neighborhood.The new policy is Apple&#39;s attempt to prevent people from purchasing and then unlocking and reselling iPhones, a situation that has been a problem for the company. Apple won&#39;t let anyone without a credit card or debit card in their name purchase iPhones, according to an unidentified Apple Store employee in a phone interview.&quot;We need to track the purchases of the iPhone [because] we have people buying the phones, unlocking the phones and selling them,&quot; she said.A report by the Associated Press last week said Apple was limiting the purchases to two devices and allowing users to purchase them only with credit or debit cards. According to store employees, the two-device limit has always been in place, but the noncash policy is new.Apple&#39;s public relations team did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the new policy. However, it&#39;s no secret the company is trying to stem the tide of unlocked and resold phones, now totaling about 250,000. Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook mentioned that number last week in a quarterly results conference call as the difference between the number of handsets sold -- approximately 1.4 million -- and those actually connecting via AT&amp;T Wireless, the iPhone&#39;s exclusive U.S. carrier.If one analyst&#39;s estimate is correct, those unlocked phones are costing Apple millions of dollars. Piper Jaffrey analyst Gene Munster said that he believes Apple receives US$18 per iPhone per month from AT&amp;T Wireless, based on iPhone-related revenue Apple reported in its latest quarterly earnings , totaling more than $4.5 million in lost revenue.REFERENCES:AT&amp;T paying Apple $18 per iPhone per month?, Macworld.co.uk, Oct. 25, 2007Apple: 250,000 iPhones unlocked from AT&amp;T, Network World (US), Oct. 25, 2007
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All that glitters doesn't stay sold Comment The genius of Apple's strategy for its iPhone is to make a defensive move look like an offensive one.â¦
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Kevin Tofel explains how to use an iPhone as a portable handheld photo gallery using the beautiful AP wire photos and FlickrFan.   I did a Qik video demo using my Nokia N95. Lots of computers involved, the quality ain't great but the idea is pretty neat.
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(InfoWorld) - Hackers may successfully unlock an iPhone in as soon as three to seven days, according to a representative of one effort that aims to unlockÂ Apple's new handset. "We believe it will be easy. We are privately aware many of the iPhone engineers came from other handset manufacturers, and we understand their design techniques fairly well," said gj, speaking in an interview conducted using IRC (Internet Relay Chat). He requested that his real name not be used. "Easy to us means inside one week," he said, offering an estimate of three to seven days. Unlocking the iPhone means users will be able to use the handset with other service providers, not just AT&T, which has an exclusive deal to sell the phone in the U.S. By Tuesday night, U.S. time, hackers succeeded in cracking the iPhone's activation process, a minor step towards unlocking the iPhone but a significant technical challenge. The activation process uses a software token that is sent from the phone via iTunes to Apple, which signs the token and returns it to the phone. When that process is completed, iTunes tells the phone to activate. Hackers developed tools for both Windows and MacOS that allow users to activate their phones without iTunes. But users will have to use a token from an activated iPhone, which can be used to activate multiple phones. The hackers are not providing a token with the tools. "If you don't have a known token (which does contain identifying information) you won't be able to use the tool," gj said. At least one other hacker found a way to activate the iPhone without using iTunes. Jon Lech Johansen -- better known as DVD Jon, a hacker who helped develop the DeCSS tool for decrypting DVDs -- released a tool that can activate the iPhone without iTunes on his blog. "The iPhone does not have phone capability, but the iPod and Wi-Fi work," Johansen wrote. Cracking the activation process brings hackers one step closer to their goal of unlocking the iPhone. The phone requires iTunes to activate functions such as its camera and music player. But the process also requires signing up for a two-year data plan with AT&T. "Activating the phone really just makes the device more 'usable' for those who want to use it as a Wi-Fi device, for instance," gj said. With the activation process cracked hackers turned their focus to unlocking the iPhone, a challenge that is expected to be easier than cracking the activation process. "Unlocking is a function of the radio and the radio's interaction with the SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) logic, and these are mostly standards based," gj said. A rumored software update for the iPhone, expected to be released on July 5, could undo some of the progress hackers made towards unlocking the phone. "If Apple releases an update on July 5th that includes 'fixes' for our efforts so far, it will be a setback," gj said. "I don't know if it will be a permanent one." Hackers working together to unlock the iPhone don't belong to a specific group, and don't plan to claim credit for their work, gj said. "We just want to see the hardware freed. We accept that others will exploit those works but hopefully it will be a lesson to Apple," he said. "They're such a great company, it's a real shame for them to lock everything down like this. The design is top notch," he said. "They would win far more business by setting an example for the industry."
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A new software-based unlocking scheme for your iPhone makes it easier for those of us without soldering skills to leave AT&T. But the good times probably won't last.
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In the wake of Apple's swift--and steep--iPhone price cuts, early adopters may have to live with shorter windows of joy.
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(InfoWorld) - Efforts to unlock Apple's iPhoneÂ continued on Monday, with hackers claiming "very significant progress." The locked iPhone only works with AT&T's EDGE network, and cannot be used with cellular service from other providers. Locked phones are generally used to help operators recoup the cost of subsidizing handsets for their customers, but AT&T is not subsidizing the iPhone, which is priced at either $499 or $599, depending on the model. Instead, the phone is locked because AT&T has a five-year agreement with Apple to be the sole iPhone provider in the U.S. Unlocking the iPhoneÂ would be a boon for users locked into a contract with another U.S. carrier, or for users outside the U.S. who want an iPhone. While initial signs indicate an unlocked iPhone is possible, hackers must first overcome several challenges. One of those involves circumventing the authentication process in iTunes that both lets users register for an AT&T service plan and turn on the phone's features, including its camera and music player. By Monday evening, U.S. time, hackers had made headway towards circumventing the activation process. But the phone remained locked at the time of writing. "We have been fairly successful in spoofing iTunes activation processes. This should allow us to activate the phone," poster gj wrote on the iPhone Dev Wiki, one of several Web sites tracking efforts to unlock the phone. "It may in fact also prevent the SIM locking from occurring in the first place ... though we haven't verified this yet." These advances allowed hackers to set and read data on the iPhone, including the ability to query whether a phone has been activated. "The rest of our work is legwork really, in understanding how certain functions operate with the rest of the phone," the site said, adding hackers are close to the ability to browse system files on the iPhone, a key step toward unlocking the handset. Once the activation problem has been overcome, hackers will be faced with other questions. For instance, does iTunes have the ability to recognize a phone that was not activated for use with the AT&T network? If so, how will iTunes react? After these questions are resolved, hackers can focus on unlocking the handset itself. That task is made easier by the iPhone's use of a removable SIM (Subscriber Identity Module), a smart card that contains a user's phone number as well as storage space for contacts and messages, instead of one that was hardwired into the phone. The use of a removable SIM card means the iPhone is locked using its firmware, which can likely be cracked. While hackers race ahead to unlock the iPhone as quickly as possible, iPhone Dev Wiki poster gj criticized those hackers competing against each other to unlock the phone, saying the lack of cooperation had slowed progress. "I can't emphasize enough how much this s*** stinks. Trust me, your ego is not as important as you think it is. If everyone worked together we would have been done by now, but instead we have a******* all over the world trying to 'beat us to the punch,'" the poster wrote. Â
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Blog: AT&T and Apple are both banking on the iPhone, but will people switch subscribers to get it?
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Blog: The hack allows Wi-Fi and iPod features but won't allow you to make phone calls.
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By Barbara Grady  MATT MORGAN of Alameda said he plans to borrow an iPhone from a friend to check it out before he plunks down $500 for his own.
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(InfoWorld) - No one ever said Apple marketers weren't clever. So if they wanted to start a firestorm of ISVs developing applications for the iPhone, how better to do that than to make development as simple as possible with the least barriers? Nevertheless, until we hear more details from Apple about the way in which applications are handled on the iPhone, we won't know how clever Apple really is. At WWDC07, Jobs promised that there will be a "new way to create applications for the iPhone" due mainly to the fact that it uses the full Safari browser engine. But a lot of developers are disappointed with what Apple is offering. "Web-based apps are cool for a lot of things. But what people were looking forward to was to to let them develop native applications," said Anthony MeadowÂ , president of Bear River AssociatesÂ , an ISV for mobile applications Without native access to facilities, you don't have storage or sharing of information between applications, or reading and writing from address book and iCal. "There is not any easy way to do that with a Web-based application," said Meadow. Overall, Meadow was not impressed. Although he admitted it is really not very clear what Apple intends. But, he added, "If they don't intend to have access, they should just tell us." Ken Dulaney, the senior mobile analyst with Gartner says Apple's Web 2.0 solution is likely to be similar to what RIM does now. "It avoids having to put code down on the device," Says Dulaney, which in turn protects it from crashing due to outside influences. On RIM devices, the application is rendered on the server side, and the cache in the browser reformats it and pushes it down to the device. "The code is only resident briefly on the device," Dulaney said. Similar technology is also used by device manufacturers using mobile Linux from MontaVista. Now resident on tens of millions of cell phones, the MontaVista design uses a "computing peer" design, Linux on the server and on the phone, giving developers the flexibility of partitioning an application on the client side and server side. An ISV can put a heavy load on the phone or a light one, says Jim Ready, CTO and founder of MontaVista. "Linux on the phone is every bit as capable as Linux on the server," said Ready. Certainly this supports similar statements from Jobs about Safari on the desktop and Safari on the iPhone. However, like Meadow at Bear River, Ready has some reservations about the future capabilities or the richness of applications running on the iPhone. When applications are developed solely using an "abstracted" development environment that doesn't talk to the lower layers of the device, such as the hardware and middleware, there is a dividing line in terms of the capabilities of the application. "Take video frame rates. The reason you back out of an abstracted environment is because you pay for the abstraction in performance. It is a tradeoff," said Ready. And not only for performance -- developers also need to write native applications that get down closer to access the hardware and the middleware for size and control reasons, as well, although Meadow doesn't see access to hardware as a major problem. "There is a handful of people that care about writing to the chips. It is possibly useful for really high performance graphic drivers and low level networking code," he says. So where does that leave gamers and business users whose need for rich network applications might be problematic on the iPhone? Unfortunately, until the full story is known, it is hard to tell what the software limitations of the iPhone will be. Certainly, if Apple wants the device to be a great mobile gaming system for use by millions of road warriors during those long waits at the airport, it will have to address the issue of how to get developers to write applications native to both the hardware and middleware. In business as well, cell phones are currently being used with customized software, such as bar code and RFID readers. "You can't do that with a browser interface," says Jerry Panagrossi, vice present of U.S. Operations for Symbian. "You need something more in-depth that can talk to IBM or Oracle middleware using native APIs for a richer experience." Jim Ready at MontaVista sums it up when he says keeping the development environment as simple as possible will facilitate the largest amount of applications. As far as the capabilities of those applications Ready says, "There are limits, but sometimes it's okay that there are limits."