Joy of Gadgets

Ok, I was suckered into something I said I wouldn’t do: I actually jaikbroke and unlocked my iPhone. George Hotz, a.k.a. geohot make it so easy with blackra1n. It was a super easy process to do, and if you do a restore, your iPhone is back to its Steve Jobs approved state.

For the most part, I don’t want a jailbroken phone. However, Apple (or is it AT&T?) doesn’t permit the iPhone to be unlocked in the United States. I don’t need that often, but it is handy when I am traveling, which I have done quite a bit lately.

One other thing I can certainly use is the ability to tether, which AT&T still doesn’t officially support. However the blacksn0w also enables the IPCC “hack” that allowed you to download a provisioning file that enables tethering (i.e. using your iPhone as a modem). That’s also useful when traveling, particularly if there isn’t an iPass-compatible WiFi hotspot nearby.

There’s a part of me that feels uneasy about this. Geohot and others like him are finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities in the iPhone to inject code into the phone to make it do things Apple didn’t want you to do. Whereas we usually hear about the “bad” results of security vulnerabilities–and these exploits could be seriously bad in the wrong hands–this actually gives the user more functionality.

Apple will, of course, study these jailbreak tools and find a way to close the security holes they take advantage of. Typical in the game of cat-and-mouse between vendor and hacker. Of course, if Apple had more customer-friendly policies related to unlocking the device and allowing installation of “unapproved” apps, this problem would mostly go away.

Apple could be using these “hackers” to make their phone as secure as possible. Once Apple believe the phones are invulnerable to these kinds of attacks, they could simply provide easy access to device unlock and allow people to install whatever apps they want. People get the functionality they want with a much more secure device to boot. Everyone wins.

That’s just a crackpot theory, of course, and I’m probably wrong about it. I hope I’m not.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Enable Tethering on Your iPhone 3G or 3GS Running 3.1.2 [IPhone] (lifehacker.com)
• Dutch Hacker Hijacks iPhones. Offers Owners Fix…for Cash. (thenextweb.com)
• Blacksn0w Tool to Unlock the iPhone 3G and 3GS Coming Soon (techie-buzz.com)
• Blackra1n and Blacksn0w Tutorial to unlock iPhone 3G/3GS (techie-buzz.com)
• PSA from Geohot – iPhone unlock coming (geardiary.com)
• Tutorial: How to Tether on an iPhone 3G or 3GS running OS 3.1.2 (mobilecrunch.com)

Here is some feedback I have sent to Apple regarding the latest issues related to Apple killing “Google Voice” type applications in the App Store and Apple’s statements that jailbreaking your iPhone will cause the world to end. I would encourage you all to do the same.

I’ve seen a number of news stories that says that Apple thinks people shouldn’t hack the baseband software in their iPhones because it can cause damage to the mobile phone network. If there was a simple way to unlock the iPhone people paid for without hacking the baseband, people wouldn’t be hacking the baseband. Make it dead simple like a Nokia–enter a code into the phone, boom, the device is unlocked.

People would not be as interested in jailbreaking iPhones, either, if there was some way for people to install apps that Apple does not approve of. The best app on a Nokia is something called Gravity. It is digitally signed, but frequently not by Symbian (who is owned by Nokia). Other platforms have this concept as well.

Both of these issues–and resulting bad PR–is entirely self-inflicted. Please consider changing your policies in these areas to more customer-friendly ones. Permit people to unlock their legitimately paid for iPhones and install applications of their own choosing.

While I admit I like the idea of a more capable Apple iPod Touch (with a built-in mic and camera), and I agree that it will be a great mobile multimedia device, I disagree with Andy Abramson’s assertion that it will be big for VoIP.

One of the use cases Andy mentions that he think will be huge is “Pre-teens who need a phone but can’t afford a contract.” First of all, the iPod Touch is quite a pricey device for most teens, whereas your typical prepaid phone is a lot cheaper. Sure, some teens will get an iPod Touch, but unless the price goes down, not as many as Andy thinks.

Once you get past the price issue, the second, more important piece of functionality is missing from the iPod Touch: SMS. This is the killer app for teens. I know, I had one staying with me for 10 days. I know there are probably services that make that happen, and with Apple’s Push Notification Sevices, realtime SMS on an iPod Touch is doable.

Even if such a service exists, how will the teens find out? Word of mouth, I suppose. Even so, most of these services require credit cards for payments, making them non-starters again for teens.

Now, I do agree that an iPod Touch with an integrated microphone would make a compelling VoIP device. The reason I don’t think it will be big? The lack of background applications. In order to make and receive calls, you have to leave an application running in the foreground. That might work for making calls–which I could see some business travelers using–but for receiving calls? A non-starter from my point of view.

It’s that time again:

FreeConferencing.com Launches: Until they do something to equalize inter-carrier compensation between most civilized parts of the United States and rural locations, services like FreeConferenceCall.com and now FreeConferencing.com will continue to exist and be profitable. By hosting these services in, say, rural Iowa, they actually make a small amount of money per minute on incoming calls. Anyway, FreeConferencing.com is a way to do a one-to-many call, complete with a web-based console to manage the call.

Vonage Trying To Act Like Mobile Phone Carriers: Vonage, the VoIP landline replacement service provider that refuses to die, is now offering a deal where you can sign up and not pay for equipment, shipping, or activation. The catch? You have to sign a two year agreement complete with early termination fees that are, according to my calculations, worse than a mobile phone contract.

iPopperz Fashion Earphones: Personally not my thing, but these are relatively inexpensive, in-ear haedphones with a number of styles, colors, and whatnot. I would consider buying the black, green, and black pair. One cool thing: they sell replacement earpads. Granted, there is a huge amount of markup there, but it’s the first time I’ve seen them available.

Bad Experience on DeFi Mobile: I briefly wrote about DeFi Mobile in October. Wasn’t sure how well the service was going to be when it went live, but someone forwarded me some correspondence to and from the company related to their experience. In short: it was bad voice quality and improper CallerID. Anyone have a good experience with DeFi Mobile?

Qwest Offering Free WiFi Nationwide: If you happen to live in an area where Qwest is your local exchange carrier and you get high speed Internet from them, now you can take it with you–sort of. Qwest has signed a deal with AT&T to provide Qwest customers free WiFi at 17,000 AT&T operated WiFi hotspots. Personally, I think it’s worth $9.95 a month for Boingo, which offers WiFi at AT&T locations and a whole bunch more!

Clearly, my current employer feels threatened by the current economic conditions as they’ve announced they are asking up to 1,000 people to leave on their own in order to lessen “the need for involuntary redundancies.” Internally, of course, there were other announcements along these lines, so seeing a public announcement about it is no shock.

What’s also not a shock is that there isn’t any new corporate direction announced that takes this tough economic climate into account. This is more of a function of Nokia’s planning cycles, which will likely finish sometime after the Security Appliance Business is sold off to Check Point Software. This means while I might see some of the beginning phases as an insider, I’ll get to hear the results of this planning at the same time as the rest of you

While nobody is asking my opinion, here’s some ideas I think Nokia can incorporate to improve their overall situation. I can’t claim no jobs will be lost as a result of implementing these ideas, but I think it will help financially and improve overall market share.

Less Planning, More Doing: Being deeply involved in the Security Appliance Business in Nokia for the last 10 years, I know we follow many of the same planning methods the rest of Nokia uses for getting products from concept to shipping product. While I think those processes serve a valuable function, particularly for improving mature, shipping products, in the early concept phases, the processes are too constraining. The only example I need to give here is the fact it took Nokia over two years to ship the product that was widely considered Nokia’s attempt an iPhone-like interface.

Less Phones: Internally, in the context of the various reorganizations, I’ve heard the phrase “we’re putting more word behind fewer arrows.” We clearly need to do this on the handset front, too. Instead of releasing 70+ handsets a year, let’s shoot for, say, a dozen different handsets. Put more into differentiating and perfecting this delightful dozen. Each one of these handsets should be a delight to use. Each handset should have exactly one hardware variant that works on all 2G and 3G networks available today (including T-Mobile’s 1700)!

More Modular OS: While Nokia proclaims S60 is “open to anything,” try replacing a core component like the web browser or the messaging client. You can’t short of a complete firmware upgrade. The OS needs to allow components to be updated as needed (for example, when a security vulnerability arises). This would hopefully reduce the need for variant firmware testing, though I know it can’t be eliminated.

More Retail Presence: This is primarily a North American point of view, I suppose, but if Nokia wants to improve its overall sales–which will improve the bottom line–there has to be more of a concerted effort to get product into brick-and-mortar retail in North America. This includes working with carriers to some extent, as North Americans still predominantly buy handsets from carrier stores.

Those are just a few of the ideas I have, what about you? How do you think Nokia can increase their profitability in these tough economic times?

Pat Phelan and others gotta be thinking about this: how to pair up their global SIM with the iPhone without, say, encouraging people to unlock their handset or using SIM hacking tools. My answer: become an authorized “carrier” partner with Apple. Sell the iPhone with your SIM. Make it easy for people to go iPhone and not be ripped off for global roaming.

My guess is that the price would have to be unsubsidized, since there’s no proper monthly fee charged by these service providers. You might also consider disabling GPRS data by default since many of these “global SIMs” don’t offer data, or don’t do it at an affordable enough rate to use for anything more than a small amount of data.

Or do one better. Does Apple allow you to use, say, an iPhone you bought through AT&T with an O2 SIM? O2 is Apple’s carrier partner in the UK? If it does, then provided Apple “authorizes” the MaxRoam (or other global) SIM for use in the Apple iPhone, they don’t even need to sell the phone!

Of course, this will probably never happen. But it’s a nice idea.

I would expect someone like Andy Abramson to be excited about his client, Truphone, getting an application on the Apple iPod Touch that makes it possible to make VoIP calls over WiFi. Eventually, according to MarketWatch, you’ll be able to receive calls as well, though I’m not sure how that will work given Apple doesn’t allow background apps on their iPhone and iPod Touch.

However, when I look at it in the bigger picture, I go “meh.” It’s not exciting to me. Turning something that isn’t a phone into a phone is old hat. That’s been a reality on the Nokia N800/N810 for a while thanks to Skype. I’m sure you can think of other examples of this as well.

I don’t see a lot of “average” people go through the trouble of downloading the Truphone app from Apple’s App Store, getting the necessary microphone adapter from Apple, and using this to make calls versus some other method. No doubt some people will do it–perhaps people aided by geeks like me, perhaps not.

Most of the people I know can barely use their mobile phone. Anything more complicated than making a call, receiving a call, and perhaps using the camera requires assistance from someone like me. I helped my wife’s aunt over Thanksgiving with her LG Dare, never having seen the phone before.

Now granted, not everyone has an iPhone, or an iPod Touch. Apple does make it dirt simple to get apps onto the handset. I’m sure the smart guys at Truphone guys have also done a brilliant job of making this application dirt simple to use, much like they’ve done on the Nokia handsets.

I am struggling to see the market for this. It might seem like there is with 300 Million applications downloaded from Apple’s App Store. However, what percentage of Apple’s iPhone/iPod Touch user base have actually downloaded an application and installed it? How many Apple iPhone and iPod Touch users are actively using third party apps on their devices? My gut says not nearly as many as people are thinking.

The other niggling question is: of the people that download Truphone’s iPod Touch application, how many will turn into paying users instead of just using the free features of the application?

I would love to be wrong and have this be a mainstream game changer. I’d love to see more people using VoIP, but I’m having trouble seeing how this vision will work. Can anyone help clarify it for me?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Turning the iPod Touch into a phone
• Truphone enables WiFi phone calls on iPod Touch
• Truphone Turns iPod touch Into iPhone
• Truphone for iPod Touch: Accessing Skype Contacts and Social Media
• Did You Know Your iPod Touch is a Phone?
• Your Own Free iPhone Via An iPod Touch?
• Wireless turns iPod into a phone

Carolyn Schuk is not happy that the mainstream press is amazed that women like smartphones. Her contention is that women buy and use smartphones too!

She’s right. Here’s the secret, though: outside of the small percentage of people that either work for a mobile phone manufacturer, operator, retailer, or otherwise follow the industry, most people don’t know what a smartphone is. If you say the term smartphone, they look at you like you’re from Jupiter. They should. It’s a silly term.

What people do know is what they want from a phone, or think would be cool. 5 years ago, I purchased a Nokia 3650 from AT&T and brought it home. My wife saw the phone and thought it might be cool to have a phone like that, so I bought her one. It took pictures and had the round keypad. It could take movies and send them via MMS. Beyond that, my wife had no clue it was a smartphone–or cared.

In the real world, I see both men and women with devices that could be classified as Smartphones. Just this afternoon, I saw a lady in Costco putting a Palm Centro in her purse. For all I know, she may have purchased it because it had a QWERTY keyboard and she wanted to be able to send text messages as opposed to running random applications downloaded from the Internet. Or maybe she got it free with a 2 year agreement.

Whatever the reason, it doesn’t matter. Normal people buy phones they can afford with the functionality they desire. If it happens to be a smartphone, they won’t even know it. Or care. It’s a phone. Women have them too. Get over it.

Happy Mothers Day to all you mothers out there!

This past week has been a busy week for posts, it seems like. I even managed a post on my internal Nokia blog this week.

The post list this week:

• How Operators Dialed Long Distance Calls (From voip.com/blog)
• Nine Inch Nails Ghosts I-IV (From Digital Music–The Future)
• Click To Call (From voip.com/blog)
• Belkin Desktop Internet Phone For Skype (From The VoIP Weblog)
• Tommy Telephone: The Making Of A Telephone (From The VoIP Weblog)
• The World of Communications, Then And Now (From voip.com/blog)
• Qt 4.4 Brings The Best Of Web And Native Applications Together (From The Mobile Technology Weblog)
• Sprint Ceding WiMAX to Clearwire (From The Wireless Weblog)
• TopMobile20 Announces Mobile Software Contest (From The Mobile Technology Weblog)
• Twitter With Your Voice With Twitterfone (From Web 2.0 Weblog, The Mobile Technology Weblog, The VoIP Weblog, The Social Networking Weblog, and The Republic of Geektronica)
• How Sound Synchronizes Up With Pictures (From voip.com/blog)
• Go Back To Your Roots, Carriers! (From The VoIP Weblog)
• Qwest to Resell Verizon Wireless Service (From The Wireless Weblog and The Mobile Technology Weblog)
• What About The Analog Devices? (From The Digital TV Weblog, The Gadgets Weblog, and The Wired Home Weblog)
• Jangl Team Joining Jajah (From The VoIP Weblog)
• How Does A Phone Work? (From voip.com/blog)
• G.729 versus G.711 (From voip.com/blog)
• Your Antenna On Your Roof May Need Replacing (From The Digital TV Weblog)
• More Bars In More Places–Except Where You Go (From The Mobile Technology Weblog)
• Touch Tones and VoIP (From voip.com/blog)

The rumor being reported by Engadget is that AT&T will finally get the Nokia N95-3 sometime in the second quarter of 2008. That’s funny because I’ve personally owned a Nokia N95-1 for at least a year, though it’s not the U.S. 3G variant which hasn’t been out quite as long.

In a way, it kind of reminds me of the Nokia 9290, the U.S. variant of the Nokia 9210 “Communicator” device. By the time the device hit the U.S. market–almost two years after the 9210 was released in Europe, GPRS data service was widely available in the U.S.. The 9290 only used GSM data (e.g. dialup at 9600 bps), making it far too slow to be useful for any data-intensive applications.

While there hasn’t been any major advancements in mobile phone technology since the Nokia N95-1 originally came out, and the N95-3 is miles ahead of anything currently available through a carrier store, I can’t help but wonder when the gap will decrease between device releases in Europe and in the U.S. will decrease. Using the above example as a reference point, it has, but I think it still has a ways to go.

What will be interesting in all this is what “carrier customizations” will be present on the AT&T version of the N95.  What differences in functionality will exist between an unbranded N95-3 and an AT&T-branded N95-3. I don’t know, but I do know that if the restrictions are too onerous, you can bet people will unbrand it as quick as they can.

photo credit: jurvetson