Hackers Finally Unlock iPhone 3G

nandemoari quotes a story at Infopackets: "2009 has gotten off to a great start for a team of iPhone enthusiasts with little regard for Apple's licensing requirements. They've finally figured out a way to get the phone to work with any cell phone carrier (and not just AT&T). The iPhone Dev Team is best known for their work on 'jailbreaking;' the technique of altering an iPhone so that you can run any applications on it, not just those approved by Apple. Given the company's questionable vetting policy for entry to the official App store, it's not surprising many users approve of jailbreaking."

Comments

Re:Finally

[xmpcray]

And to add to this, they explicitly say they don't want any donations.

We've seen some comments about you lovely people wanting to donate money to us. We'd just like to say that we DO NOT accept donations. There is no paypal account associated to us, there is no way to donate to us, we do this as a hobby and don't want to be paid and we fund all of this ourselves and it works out just fine.

Anyone who says "donate to DevTeam" in our name is lying, so don't send them anything, you'll just fund their crack habit.

Keep your dough for the lovely shiny Apple products, we think you'll need it.

If you do want to send us something, please send a scan of a postcard from your city, handwrite a nice message scan it and sent it over to blog@iphone-dev.com

http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/41744653/donations-to-dev-null

Re:I do not understand...

[JaredOfEuropa]

I cite two reasons why people are buying iPhones

Those are good reasons, but the most important reason I think is that the user interface just works so damn well. It does for me... I am no Apple fanboy (the only other Apple device I own is an iPod, the rest is all Windows stuff), but I bought one, despite
- no out-of-the-box todo lists
- no notepad that is actually useful (and syncs)
- no cut & paste (a major omission), and poor (if any) communication between apps
- crippled Bluetooth (only works with headsets, can't use it to hook up a Bluetooth keyboard or other peripherals).
- locked down OS (can't replace the standard keyboard with a custom one, for instance).
- rumours of poor battery life and poor reception (I haven't noticed any of these. Tip to increase battery life: turn off location services; the GPS chip is power hungry... like it is on any other cell phone).

So why are people buying despite all this? I don't think having a built-in iPod and some amusing apps make up for this. The following, however, does:
- Form factor. It's small. And I thank Apple for not putting a damn physical keybord inside, which would make it considerably bulkier.
- Ease of use. The UI is simple and responsive certainly compared to WME.
- The multi-touch screen: brilliant not because of the cute "pinch" zoom gesture, but because I can operate it with my fat fingers. Whereas my other smart phones required me to use a fingernail or the stylus, I can operate the iPhone 1-handed using my thumb.

Typing messages is actually pretty good on the iPhone. As you'd expect, typing speed is somewhere between the on-screen keyboard & stylus of WME phones, and phones with a physical keyboard. But that's not what Apple needs to work on to capture the business market. Apple needs to address security by offering a mandatory PIN login that cannot be disabled by the user, and a remote wipe function. Without those two, you can forget about corporations allowing these things to VPN in and access the Exchange server.