October 18th, 2007iPhone beginner’s guide (unlocking, additional apps…)
I’ve managed for long enough not to talk or write any article about the iPhone. That was before I got my hands on one long enough as a user (not a tester), which happened last sunday. For the anecdot, I bought it at the San Francisco Apple Store and the seller warned me at least 3 times that if I unlocked it, cool for me, but I shouldn’t come to the apple store again, complaining if I had problems…
Anyway, here are a few tips and tricks I found in the past days (went to bed really late yesterday night because of it) that wil, I hope, help you get the most out of this extra ordinary toy.
Activation
So, first things first, to begin with, you will need to activate it. You can do it via the regular iTunes process if you intend to use it with an at&t subscription, but that was not my case. So to get a working ipod phone, you’ll need a simple software named iNdependance.It’s very convenient and keeps you (partly from the hassle of command line).
I won’t go into every detail since the process is quite complicated but getting your iphone activated is fairly easy, especially if you have a 1.02 version (which was my case). But I decided I wanted the latest 1.1.1 version… and things became a bit more complex, but once again, the help menu of indendence will be your friend.
Unsimlock
Trickier part: You’ll need to use a special procedure (with many steps) to downgrade and then upgrade your firmware to 1.1.1. Once this is done, you’ll have to install the latest version of anySIM. This part can be tricky for several reasons:
- You’ll need to use the command line
- The root password indicated in the doc was not the good one
So, after investigation, the correct root password was alpine (and not dottie) and an ftp client that supports sftp (such as transmit) can be used to browser and transfer files to the phone (in the /Applications folder in the case of anySIM).
Here’s a short video I shot with my N95 (sorry it’s blurry) showing the rather complicated process anySIM went through to unsimlock the phone.
Some cool native apps
The first one (the mother of all) that you’ll need to install is the awesome installer.app. Thanks to it, you’ll be able to install, update and remove apps, over the air, in a very simple an intuitive interface. When you know that Apple has been preventing (up to early next year) custom apps development, this app is simply stunning!
Then you’ll need a serious app to manage your installed apps 
SummerBoard is a themable launcher replacement/hack with themes and various functions support. It’s an absolute must!
Last but not least, the excellent apollo IM client is available in the installer.app community sources (it took me a while to understand that this app was in fact an additional series of apps sources ;))
Some cool web apps
There are now plenty of very cool web apps, so here are 2 random ones that I find particularly well done:
- a very nice twitter client: Hahlo
- facebook for your iphon: here (not original but a really cool web app)
- bejeweled casual game: bejeweled
I hope that you’ll find this guide useful. I’ll update it when I discover new things and tricks!
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