iPhone & iPhone 3G News

The company noted that it had reached 300 million downloads back on December 5th, meaning that 200+ million apps have been downloaded in just 5 weeks.

Here’s an interesting accessory for anyone who’s not satisfied with his/her mobile phone’s camera.The wide angle lens (pictured above) offers a .67x zoom with Super Macro. The trio of lenses provide: Wide Angle, Telephoto (2x) and Fish-Eye capabilities to the iPhone (original and 3G) as well as a slew of other phones and even computers.

The yellowsn0w iPhone 3G unlock application has arrived. The version is 0.9.1 beta… That’s right, it’s still in ‘beta’, so do use it at your own risk. Backup your data before you attempt this!

BASICS

• The unlock about to be released works exclusively with baseband 02.28.00. This baseband is provided by the latest firmware update (2.2) from Apple.  You’ll need to upgrade to this release using iTunes and then use QuickPwn to activate etc. There are plenty of tutorials about this on iclarified, bigboss, and other established tutorial sites.  Because it works on 02.28.00, it is available to everyone on the planet.  This means we don’t need to unnecessarily expose holes in earlier basebands, which is an important concern.
• The application is a small daemon that is launched on boot.  It injects the payload at boot and also whenever there is a baseband reset.  You won’t notice anything about it other than that your third-party sim now works.  It’s a small program and unobtrusive.  There is no GUI (this is by design).
• There are Cydia and Installer sources available, so use whichever you are comfortable using.
• yellowsn0w is completely removable through Cydia, the command line, and iTunes.

KNOWN ISSUES

• There is a known issue with SIM cards that have STK (SIM Toolkit) application menus.  These menus are usually items such as “top up” “get credit” etc. These menu items confuse the application sometimes.  Removing and reinserting the SIM once after reboot (give it about 10 secs after you see the slide to unlock widget) fixes this issue.  We’re working on a better fix.
• For those of you using SIM cards without STK menus, the application has some optional arguments that will make the unlock much faster for you.  So either experiment on your own (use “yellowsn0w -h” for usage) or wait for a customization writeup.
• After you install yellowsn0w via Cydia, you should return to the Cydia main menu then reboot your iPhone with the 3rd party SIM installed.  Wait for the slide to unlock screen, then wait 10 or 15 secs more.   If you don’t see your carrier name pop up, then remove your SIM, reinsert it, and wait 10 secs more.  This is the step we’ll be working on eliminating next.

RANDOM

• The application is version 0.9.  This is considered beta software, and you use it at your own risk (you know the score).  We guarantee that it’s not perfect and will require tweaking.  Welcome to the cutting edge.  (It’s a good thing these are just temporary RAM patches!)
• The application is released on a non-commerical basis.  Please do not accept pirates and scummy ripoffs of this software. We license this software for single use and in a non-commerical environment (meaning you can’t charge for it). The techniques and methods used are not to be used by third party companies.
• Direct linking to the repository URLs is prohibited, please only link to this post. We will be checking referers.

Softbank Mobile today announces a new external battery for iPhone 3G, letting iPhone 3G users in Japan to charge their iPhone anytime anywhere.The device allows users in Japan to charge their iPhone on the go. This battery extender can also function as the One-Seg media broadcast receiver and transmits the video via WiFi signal to iPhone 3G for up to 3 hours.

Here is a list of the changes for the new iPhone 2.1 firmware, which have been released last Friday

iPhone 2.1 Change Log:

• Decrease in call set-up failures and dropped calls
• Significantly better battery life for most users
• Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
• Improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
• Faster installation of 3rd party applications
• Fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes for users with lots of third party applications
• Improved performance in text messaging
• Faster loading and searching of contacts
• Improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
• Repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
• Option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts
• Genius playlist creation

The iPhone Dev Team has also released their new PwnageTool 2.1. The team has figured out a way to avoid iTunes 8.0 detection which previously do not allow your Pwnaged iPhone to connect with the iTunes. Check out the Pwnage Tool 2.1 here