Tech Tok

iPhone users are currently paying $30 for voice + $40 for data = $70/month,
so for two smartphone users sharing one Rogers bill, this could save $50.

This doesn’t includes all the service charges, 911 fees, and postage and handling that Rogers charges, which probably whittles the real savings down to 52¢ or something. :-/

It shows up at the top of the
search results for “family data plan”,
but Rogers isn’t very rigorous about links into their site, so YMMV.

Apparently Rogers
has revived the $30 for 6 GB data plan, originally offered at iPhone launch.
Also, they’ve
added MMS to the value pack while also increasing its cost from $15 to $20.

On top of all this, it is expected that Rogers will announce
a new high-capacity data plan for phones/mobile that will top out at 15 GB/month for $150. Yikes!

HTC Android phone – click for larger

Rogers
has announced
[1]
[2]
availability of the HTC Dream and HTC Magic phones, both running Google’s Android OS, which is not dissimilar to the iPhone’s OS.

The major concern with the previous Android phone, the G1, was the battery life.
It would last an hour.
Apparently this is no longer such an issue.
According to
ZDNet Asia:

Inevitably the connected nature of many of the HTC Magic’s applications means that you’ll push the battery pretty hard. The quoted life is up to 7.5 hours of talk and 420 hours on standby. We found we needed to charge the battery every day at first, but after the initial burst of heavy use this settled down to a couple of days between charges.

The phones cost the same – $150 – and Rogers offers a $45/month, 500 MB data plan.
Quite a bit less data than the 6 GB plan early iPhone users are currently enjoying.

Another phone on the horizon is the
Nokia N97.

My Mom lives on Wolfe Island.
She has no access to DSL (her phone lines are low quality) or cable.
Until recently, we had been considering getting her Rogers’ WiMax solution, which would have given her ~2Mbps for about $50/month.

When we called to order it over the weekend, however, the sales agent told us about the USB thingee internet solution.
I’d seen ads, and assumed it was simply WiMax on a USB dongle, which would be inappropriate for my Mom, since the inside-antenna WiMax solution wouldn’t work for her (poor signal).
We were going to go for the higher-startup-cost, outdoor antenna solution.

But no, as it turns out this USB thingee uses the 3G network for internet.
This is good news since I noticed that my iPhone was getting 5 bars at my Mom’s place.

It turns out the USB dongle has a SIM card in it.
Interesting!
So if I one could get their hands on a USB dongle, it might be possible to move an iPhone SIM into it and plug it in to the USB port on a laptop for unfettered internet with a 6 GB/month cap!

Update: apparently Rogers is calling it the Rocket.

Some apps that let you liberate your iPhone/iPod Touch from iTunes and Apple’s renaming obfuscation:
dTunes,
PwnPlayer,
and MPlayer
make a pretty potent combination.

MPlayer is probably the weakest of the bunch; playing video skips frames and sometimes has no audio.
I would expect it to get better over time though.

Just a few more reasons to JailBreak. :-)

ssh

Installing OpenSSH Allows you to login to your iPhone on the command line.
You can do all sorts of things like
using
your iPhone as an internet router.

AppleShare

ssh is a bit geeky, so you can AppleShare instead.
Browsing your WiFi will show the iPhone as plain as day.
It’s the next best thing to the “disk mode” that old iPods have.

video recording

Either live over the internet via Qik,
or locally using
Cycorder
or “VideoRecorder for iPhone”.

playing old arcade games

There are now both an NES (non-super Nintendo) and Gameboy Advance emulators for the iPhone.
I wonder why
MAME
hasn’t been ported yet?

On Saturday I successfully shared my iPhone’s 3G internet connection with two laptops we brought with us to Thorold.

It was a bit tricky, because the iPhone seemed to latch on to the WiFi connection provided by the peer-to-peer network created on the laptops.
The trick turned out to be running Safari on the iPhone, which would kick it into using the 3G network (since the peer-to-peer network had no route to the internet).

Once the iPhone was on the 3G network, I ran NetShare.
Both laptops set the iPhone’s IP address as their SOCKS proxy, and we were off to the races (although Firefox was a bit stubborn about it – I had to use Safari to browse).

So it’s good to know that should we ever need internet access in Thorold, we can use the iPhone.
We can probably also use it in Wasaga, but I suspect that we would only get EDGE networking there, which is 10x slower than 3G.

I should note that even if you don’t have the NetShare iPhone app, you can achieve the same thing (on a jailbroken iPhone)
using ssh.

 

I also found another major reason to jailbreak your iPhone: running AppleShare.
My iPhone now shows up under AppleShare over the WiFi network, which allows me to transfer files back and forth with ease.
(Sorry Mike!)

It’s pretty cool to bring up a network browser and see “Reid’s iPhone” in the list of available file servers. :-)

So they seem to have worked out the kinks with the beta Qik client for the iPhone.
Actually, the kinks were in their website’s handling of iPhone-originated video.

In any case, you can go to qik.com/rae
and see my short masterpieces.
Plus, if I happen to be recording at that moment, you can watch it live!
Ooooh, ahhh.

I will embed the video I just took at work for your edification and amusement. :-)

This is just a note about living with a jailbroken iPhone. I think I’ll update it over time.

Current jailbreak tool is PwnageTool_2.0.2.tbz,
which works with the first iPhone 2.0 update, 2.0.1.

If you find you can’t use WiFi after jailbreaking, try:

1. removing your WiFi network and adding it back again
2. use BossPrefs to “repair user dir permissions”

Interesting apps for jailbroken phones include:

NetShare

manually installed; it was pulled from the App store

NES emulator

play tons of old games!

Quake 1

BossPrefs

Lets you tweak lots of stuff, including jailbreak-specific things like “SSH Server” on/off

How to install a *.app file

cribbed from MacRumors forums.

Using an SFTP application (I use Cyberduck), drag the NetShare.app folder from the desktop into the iPhone’s /Applications folder.

Open a terminal window, and open an SSH session with the iPhone:

$ ssh root@192.168.0.5

(replace the IP address above with your iPhone’s IP Wi-Fi address.) The default root login password is “alpine”.

Next, go to the NetShare.app folder:

# cd /Applications/NetShare.app

and change the access file mask of the main application file:

# chmod 755 NetShare

Reboot (or re-spring if you know how) your iPhone.

You’re done!

My Installed Apps

Here are links to my 9 app screens:
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]

Fun, eh?