iPhone 1.1.1: Progress is Being Made
First a little background.
When Apple updated the iPhone to 1.1.1, all hell broke loose. Phones hacked to allow 3rd party apps could no longer run those apps. Unlocked iPhone’s no longer worked, sometimes they weren’t even recoverable to a working state. Apple has already had class action law suits filed. The best course of action, of course, is to simply not update, do you really need Starbuck’s crap on your iPhone anyway?
It’s been a marketing and PR disaster for Apple, and being a long time Apple fan, I think they deserve it. They should have sold the iPhone unlocked for you to use on any provider of your choice, but they got greedy, they convinced AT&T to share a portion of the profits in exchange for exclusivity. What Apple didn’t realize was that they made a deal with the devil (or El Diablo, as our friends to the south say, making AT&T sound even more evil). Almost certainly AT&T wanted this unlocking stopped and Apple had to honor the deal, thus screwing over some their most devoted (and vocal) fans.
The American cell phone business is a mess. Honestly, it’s practically a scam. You buy a phone, but you don’t really own it (like you do in the rest of the world), the cell providers just let you use it, as long as it’s on their network, under their terms with their permission. Oh, and pay out your ass while you’re at it. Oh, and sign a two year contract, with no guaranty of quality service, or it will cost even more.
But hope is there, TUAW and the good people at the iPhone Dev Wiki have made progress and 1.1.1 has been Jail-broken and some 3rd party apps are working after a recompile. It’s a ways to go yet, but it’s nice to know that some people in the world are their to work for you and help you, not in pursuit of the all mighty dollar, but innovation and openness.
Until someone (congress) straitens out this cell phone mess that we have gotten into, people like this are our only hope and I thank them from the bottom of my heart.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
[...] I’ve said it before, but now that Mossberg says it, people actually seem to care more: This whole cellphone subsidy game is an archaic remnant of the days when mobile phones were costly novelties. Today, subsidies are a trap for consumers. If subsidies were removed, along with the restrictions that flow from them, the market would quickly produce cheap phones, just as it has produced cheap, unsubsidized versions of every other digital product, from $399 computers to $79 iPods. [...]
[...] 1.1.1 Jailbreak released I talked in more detail about this a few days ago. Now the iPhone Dev Team has released their Jailbreak solution for 1.1.1. [...]