iPhone. News and Tips

Recently a new online service was presented by Adobe – Photoshop Express Online. There’s no secret, that the original Photoshop costs a lot. And this variant is “cheap, dedicated and easy to use” and so on… It looks like Adobe decided to engage potential graphic packet buyers with totally free online service. You know, imagine you are using Photoshop Online for a month or a year, and someday you think “It’s so good, that I wanna buy it, right now!”. If this scenario will work Adobe could sell another thousand of P-Shops in a year or two.

Now they are going just to mobile market and are offering a PhotoshopExpress service on your iPhone. You will be able to use it till 9th of September. You also should download a Shozu app (here’s an iTunes link) to use PE online. After the registration you will be granted by 2 Gb of free space to upload your photo on web-server. If you would like to become an official subscriber and you are ready to pay for it the available freespace will be increased to 20 Gb.

Exciting, isn’t it?

Do you remember news about the vulnerability, found in the 2.x.x Apple iPhone firmware? According to MacWorld, Apple engineers have taken this information very seriously, and are going to present an updated firmware in September (an estimated date is 9th of September), with the vulnerability elimionated.

The Apple official Jennifer Bowcock sent an e-mail to MacWorld, providing the following comment: “The minor iPhone security issue which surfaced this week is fixed in a software update which will be released in September”.

Fast and Enthusiastic – a good name of a new movie about Apple Support Engineers!

A modmyfone.com portal posted an information about new project start named XiPhone. This program should be a sum of WinPwn and QuickPwn apps with some improvements and brand new features.

The good news are that XiPhone will be built using XPWN architecture. The bad one is that only Windows users will be able to use it. Here is a short list of XiPhone features announced:

- an automatic firmware loading;
- a glamorous Vista-style design;
- an ability to export configuration settings into .xml;
- automatic software update;
- an impressive set of pre-loaded logos;
- an ability to turn on or off the customization settings after system restore.

There’s more information about project on developer’s blog – XPWN.

This is a mobile operator’s dream – a huge crowd in front of every mobile phone shop, clamouring “I wanna buy an iPhone”. A company’s market index is raising, competitiors are in panic, and all the people are happy to join the army pf your clients. This is of iPhone 3G sales start in USA, some kind of “American 3G Dream”.

photo from appleblog.pl

But if it works in America it can fail in Europe. For example, in Poland people are not so anxious to buy a new mobile, even if there are three Apple logos on it. That’s why the Orange mobile operator tried to simulate a customer rush on the eve of official iPhone sales start.

photo from appleblog.pl

The hired students of Warsaw universities organized a number of queues in front of Orange shops. They were equipped with camp chairs, provisions backpacks and everything seemed they are going to stand there until they get a new iPhone.

But at a closer look you’ll see, that all the chairs are the same color, bottles with water are the same brand, and it looks not like a sign of simultaneous will of having a new iPhone, but like a bad staging.

A T-Mobile operator decided not to organize queues, but point “the statists” directly in shops at the H-hour. It looked very curious – a huge number of customers were assaulting a T-Mobile office, but another shop 150 meters away was completely empty.

By the way: according to mobil.idnes.cz and myapple.pl, there were only 4000 iPhones sold in Czech, and approximitly 4200 sold by Era Poland mobile operator in first day of sale.

Apple recently published three new iPhone advertising movie clips. There’s nothing extraordinary in them – just the ability to by new applications in Apple App Store with ease. The target customer is a not owner of iPhone or just a non App Store visitor.

The scenarios are the same and differs only by the programs, shown in App Store.
Here’s one of the bunch:

According to Sky News agency, British Advertising Standards Authority officially banned the Apple iPhone TV advertising. The main idea of banned short movie clip is “You never knew what part of the Internet do you need… that’s why all parts of the Internet are on the iPhone”. Some people from the TV audience were irritated by the last words in the advertisement scene. They have drawn attention to the next gap: iPhone’s browser doesn’t support Flash and Java internet technologies, that’s why you wouldn’t be able to see the sites, that use these technologies. The regulator agreed with this argumentation, considered this fact as advertising rules violation and banned the clip. Now Apple must edit the wrong video clip to continue their advertisement company on television. The Apple’s officials say, that they meant the ability of iPhone owners to visit all the sites on the Internet unlike other mobile operator’s users, who are limited to view www-resources on their mobile devices. And all the sites, shown in the advertisement scene are opened on iPhone without any errors.

Probably that’s the simple misunderstanding between iPhone authorities and the TV auditory. But it’s more likely to consider it as a little corporate war between Apple and it’s competitors. Every movie clip about iPhone, that wasn’t demonstrated on TV, leads to the sales collaps. And the only who takes care of this are the other mobile phone producers.

The iPhone was presented a year ago. On 11 of July, 2008 the renewed version, iPhone 3G began to conquer mobile phones markets all over the World. It took Apple only two days to sell two millions of these 3G-mobiles.

P.S. By the way, here’s this scandalous video clip. This is not advertising. Just for your information, of course =).

After MTS announced that they will sell iPhones in Russia, the response came from Beeline. Interfax approves the fact that the deal was signed. So, we only have to wait for the Russian bee to pollinate the market with the Californian pollen.

There is no information concerning dates, however. Operators do not arrange press-conferences, although they intended to. However, two advertising companies are preparing for some actions in the Internet. One of them will work on media part, the other – on BTL actions.

What’s new:
- QuickPwn (2.0/2.0.1/2.0.2) support
- DFU assistant
- automatical updater (no need to track news on our site anymore)
- and more to come…

The other screenshots of the new release can be found at the developer’s site

Congratulations to the LiveJournal users. In the nearest future (probably on 8.11) LiveJournal.app by igrick will be ported to the new firmware.

Further information can be found in author’s blog.

In the nearest future the App Store will get a sexy arcade from famous Astraware – Golden Skull.

You’ll be acting as an adventurer called Sahid, travelling to the Maya’s ruins in order to find the “golden scull”

Price: € 2.39 / $ 2.99

iLiberty has published the figures for sales figure for iPhone 3G in Russia. A big party of iPhone was chosen. Accordingly to them:

We’ve got a big party of iPhone 3G in 5 days after the official world release. We were the first to start shipping unlocked iPhone 3G to Russia officially.

Today we can make an analysis of iPhone sales in Russia.

Despite the fact that the unlocked phones (that work in any operator’s network) cost more than 12000 rubles than the activated one (that come from USA), the majority buys the unlocked – some 80 %. However, we were not surprised, since a person who has paid a lot of money for his iPhone 3G is likely to be willing to use the phone straightaway, without having to wait for the unlocks to be released.

The other thing was a big surprise to us – Russia has incredibly small demand for white iPhone 3G 16 GB – less than 1% of the overall sales, whereas white gadgets and cars are trendy on the West. That’s why the white iPhones were hard to find, so the dealers had to sell them at a higher price, than the black ones. And they are more practical anyways – the fingerprints aren’t that noticeable on the back side, and so are the scratches.

Speaking of the 8Gb vs 16Gb sales we have an expected result – 2 versus 1.

Many people were shocked to see a 17 pages of Steve Jobes obituary. The Apple HQ in Cupertino was overwhelmed with phone calls. The people wanted to know, whether this is true.

Cupertino people were surprised, to put it mildly: why everyone knows that Apple’s frontment is dead, but not the Apple people?

Apparently, Bloomberg hase published the obituary… by mistake. In many agencies there is a common practice to prepare the obituaries in advance. They write it, while the person is still alive. This way they can react as fast as possible: when the “victim” is finally dead, the obituary is pretty much ready to be published. They simply take it from the archive, publish it and amaze their rivals with their speed.

Bloomberg’s webmasters have fixed the issue pretty fast, but the obituary went in the Web. The original can be found here. The text is about Jobes’ life, achievements, people to be contacted in first place: family, colleagues, politicians, Steve Voznyak, Bill Gates, etc.

This situation is not new. Wikipedia even has a category – List of premature obituaries.

A new messenger was released. This is an infamous (for WinMobile users) IM by Shape Services – IM+.

The app supports
AIM®/iChat, MSN®/Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo!®, ICQ®, Jabber®, Google Talk and MySpaceIM.

The compatibility test has the following results:

1. Adium: the messages are being delivered even from off-line
2. QiP: the messages have wrong encoding anyways
3. ICQ6: the messages are being delivered even from off-line

The program isn’t really customizable (apart from displaying the off-line contacts there aren’t any options) and new message notifications.

Price: free
[iTunes Link]

An utility called Russian Carrier Bundles by two former IPS Pirates employees (former iPhoneStuff) – Narmo and HoBBuT. After installation your iPhone will get the corresponding logos of the Big Trinity. There are two editions: Full and Light. You can see from screenshots what’s the main difference.

In comments you can report the missing operators. Maybe they’ll add.

Repo: http://weho.ru/iphone

An infamous ruBooks by Colel had recently hit the Cydia repo. It was ported to the new firmware by ZodTTD.

There is no stable release as of now, but I believe the update is coming soon, featuring many bug-fixes.

You can discuss the app on our .

George Hotov’s blog was updated tonight with a picture portraying some scheme or source code:

And asked a question: “What is it?”

Looks like we’ve got a quiz here or something: “Who will be the first to say that we’re talking about 3G soft unlock here.” Are we not?

P.S.: there is also the hint provided: “Look into tke code”.

Everybody was so excited about iPhones coming to Russia that an important detail was left without attention, but that detail can move iPhone’s release in Russia by more than one month.
The iPhone trademark on the Russia’s territory belongs to another company!

A year before I wrote about this story:

On the 29th of June 2007 Apple released iPhone. The same day in Russia “MD Trading” has registered the iPhone trademark. In the list of the countries, where the iPhone trademark is secured, one could not find Russia. Many countries of ex-USSR were on the list, but not Russia. Accordingly to Baker & McKenzie’s Vladimir Shitikov, “possibly, they forgot about registering in Russia, too, or mistook Ru (Russia) for Ro (Romania). This mistake can cost Apple a fortune, since they are sure that their brand is secured in Russia.”

“MD Trading” can sue Apple or offer the american company a deal. With the probability of 99% the latter will happen/

BTW, do you want to know yet another aspect? The iphone.ru domain was registered in 1997 by the “Galioptic” company, and was bought in 2008 by the company Global Event. This was made in pursuit for money. The administrator of the domain is Sergej Savabin (on the photo), he is also the GE director.

If Apple will get its trademark back, the domain will be returned with great possibility. However, it will take a long time. That’s why the company will prefer to buy the trademark out, as it happened in July 2007 with Google, who had to buy the youtube.ru domain through a ficitional KSS Associates company from my fellow cyber-squatter – for a plenty of bucks.

As was recently revealed, the new firmware has a big security issue.

Let’s protect our iPhone with a password. Now in the “Home” button options let’s set it on “Favourites”. Let’s switch to stand-by mode, then turn iPhone on, but instead of typing the password in, we switch to the “emergency call”. We click the “home” button twice and we get to our “Favorites”.

Nice password-protection, isn’t it? From favorites we can get to the email, simply by clicking the desired contact’s name. Or write and sms. Or, if the contact has an URL assigned, we can get into Safari.

Now we can try setting the “home” button to iPod, and after the same routine we will get into our player.

Here is a full how-to video:

This night PWNAGE was updated one more time.

What’s new:
- some bug-fixes
- a bug concerning access permissions on iPod Touch was fixed (a bug when the users couldn’t store their passwords)
- Installer 4.0b6 was added

It can be downloaded here, or via the automatic update in PWNAGE itself.

The young worker at the Chinese Foxconn fabric, where the iPhones are being produced, has made photos of herself with one of the new iPhones. That iPhone has then made it way to its shocked owner. The first thought about then: “The girl is going to be fired for messing around that way!”

But the owners of the fabric forgave the girl, accordingly to MacRumours. The issue was addressed to technical problems and etc.

Let me remind you, that a month ago the same thing happened. But the situation wasn’t commented then.