So I got one of those iPhone jawns. I didnt get one of the new 3G shits – I bought a used 2g because a) I am not due for a phone upgrade anytime soon and I dont want to pay $300 for a phone, and b) I didnt want to buy the mandatory $30 data plan that AT&T horn-swaggles you into . Sons of bitches.
I like this thing. I can check my work email, which although I had eschewed in the past as being “too connected,” I find it rather convenient to check my mail on the train, for example, and get some of the bullshit out of the way before I get into the office.
This thing also has an 8GB iPod, which is great. I also “jailbroke” the phone, which is a hack that allows the installation of 3rd party applications. Without the hack, only applications from Apple’s iStore can be installed on the phone. What’s amazing is the ads I see on Craigslist advertising jailbreaking services. It took me an hour to google “jailbreak,” find the right software, download it and install it, and then proceed to jailbreak the phone. It’s not rocket science. But I guess people are willing to pay some one upwards of $30 to do something that probably takes someone with experience 15 minutes to complete.
The one thing I do not like, and this a big source of consternation among iPhone fans, is the inability for the phone to send MMS text messages. MMS is a fancy way of describing text messages with pictures attached or imbedded. I have been doing a fair amount of research over the past two weeks on various on-line iPhone hacker forums. There is a way to hack the phone with 3rd party software to enable the MMS texting. I got that piece installed. However, there’s something on the AT&T side that prevents the message from going through. There’s a number of iPhone geeks working on this and I am watching the situation very closely. Some of the guys have described these really convoluted work-arounds that involve calling AT&T’s tech support and having them enable various things in your account, like WAP-pushing (dont ask). And in alot of cases, the AT&T tech people have caught wise as to what’s going on, and they may or may not enable the required features, so some of these guys have called multiple times to get to the techs that dont really give a shit and enable the features without any push-back. And, to complicate matters, the jury is still out as to whether all of this enabling of this and that actually works. Some people have had mixed results. They’ve called AT&T, gotten to the right tech, had everything enabled that needs to be turned, and they get zilch. Nada. Nothing. Some of the posts on these forums go back to 2007, so its obviously been on the radar screen for a long time.
Anyway, all of that seems like a lot of work, so I am waiting to see if a simpler solution presents itself.
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