The Phone different Podcast is back, baby! We had a long, unplanned hiatus due to technical and spiritual difficulties. Maybe not so much with the spiritual, but you get my point.

In this episode, Mike and I talk about the Macworld experience and the new products that were announced there. We also spend a bit of time on the 1.1.3 iPhone update and some other industry news. Listen in!

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News

• Macworld

  • iPhone share, see also "Rolls Dice"
  • 1.1.3 (Full rundown below)
  • Touch, $20 for the update is annoying
  • Rentals (see also Apple tv, Time Capsule)
  • MacBook Air

• 1.1.3 Update

  • leaked
  • Features of 1.1.3
  • home screen icon
  • Good and bad surprises
  • bugs and upgrade hassles, SMS problems

• JailBreak Update

  • It's all a mess. Just wait. Seriously.

• Industry Noodling

  • Rubenstein wanted a physical keyboard
  • Google is fixated on iphone, no seriously, they're fixated. Why else would their stuff be so good?
  • LOL Cats on iPhone

How To

• Mike: Easy way to get your own ringtones with Garageband
• Dieter: How To Get Photo speed Dial on your iPhone

Phone different Store

iGrip Custom Fit Flexible Mount for Apple iPhone - $19.95	Seidio 3-In-1 Travel Kit w/ Retractable USB Cable for Apple iPhone - $24.95	Seidio Inno Dock for Apple iPhone - $39.95

Community

Contact Us!
To contact us, dial 866 757 7752 extension 222. or you can email us at podcast at phonedifferent dot com, it goes directly to both of us.

Highlights from the community:

• Thanks to everyone who emailed us and said "Where the heck have you been?"
• Recommended bluetooth headset?
• 1 million unlocked iPhones?
• Check out our Marketplace

Credits

Thanks to the Phone different Store for sponsoring the podcast.

Our music comes from the following sources:

• I Called You -- iPhone Remix by Pete Leidy
via Sneakmove iPhone Ringtone Challenge
• Relaxation Spa Treatment by Dan the Automator via Wired 12.11: Sample the Future
• Wataridori 2 by Cornelius via Wired 12.11: Sample the Future
• DC 3000 by Thievery Corporation via Wired 12.11: Sample the Future

Have a question about your iPhone? Email us with "Ask PD" in the subject line!

Patrick writes in:

I updated to 1.1.3 and love it but now I am being asked for my email [...] all the time when I click on mail and it isn’t storing it.. also it isn’t storing the voicemail password.. can you help me out please so I don’t have to go back to 1.1.2

Eep. Looks like you're one of the many to experience weirdness with 1.1.3, my sincere condolences.

When it comes to fixing weird bugs like this I am personally fond of the brute force methodology. Plug in your iPhone and sync it up. Next step, make sure you have all your email sitting safely on your desktop email client. Then, in iTunes, click that scary "Restore" button under your iPhone's "Summary" settings. This will erase everything (including your music) and then you can re-sync it. I'd then recommend setting it up as a "fresh device" instead of telling it was the previous device. You should then be able to re-set everything up, from your music to your contact list to your email.

If you're not fond of the "brute force" method above, the other thing to try is to just delete that email account on your iPhone and re-set it up. As for your voicemail, well, I guess I'd try to do the same. Honestly, though, I'm going to pitch this one to the Phone different community.

Somebody have a better fix for Patrick that doesn't involve a full restore?

(p.s. This is not strictly related to your question, but I'd also recommend maybe switching your email away from your current address to Gmail or Yahoo. The benefit is that you will be able to use that even if you switch ISPs. Yahoo will give you instant push, Gmail will give you sweet sweet IMAP support)

So we know that jailbreaking 1.1.3 is possible (but a bit of a pain), but now we're also hearing that the pain doesn't necessarily stop once you've finished the jailbreak. Gizmodo is reporting on various issues including the breakage of Google Location and of various native apps. The latter isn't too surprising, as there are lots of internal changes in 1.1.3 that seem to be getting the iPhone ready for official apps. How's that? Well most applications don't run as root and there's even a hidden application key that programs will need to run. (That last means that hackers might someday be able to provide native apps without resorting it iTunes)

If all that doesn't scare you and you haven't updated to 1.1.3 yet, a couple of 13-year-olds have released an over-the-air solution for you over at http://ijailbreak.com/. 1.1.3 folks will need to downgrade to take advantage of it, though.

Sadly,the issues don't appear to be limited to just people who are hacking away at their iPhones. Folks are noticing that 1.1.3 seems to be dropping calls and handing Bluetooth poorly (though there are some ugly fixes for that).

You? How's 1.1.3 been treating ya?

Thanks to this excellent how-to and a surprisingly little time with Photoshop, we now have our very own custom Home Screen Icon for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. If you're here with your version 1.1.3 iPhone (or iPod Touch with the $20 upgrade), just click that "plus button" at the bottom and add us to your Home Screen. The iPhone's bookmark tool is even smart enough to grab the first two words from our title - "iPhone News," which seems like a pretty good indication of what you'll find when you tappy tappy that little icon.

The only bummer that I can see is the iPhone is a little overly-aggressive in adding the "glass gradient" curve on the top of the icon, but we dealt with it as best we could.

Be a cool kid and add us to your Home Screen!

Here's some good 1.1.3 news, two pieces of it. Piece one is that 1.1.3 looks to be pretty comprehensive in how much of the firmware is re-written. Which is to say that it seems to overwrite some of the nasty bits that could have been corrupted with a bad AnySIM unlock. If you have an iPhone that's inoperative, it's worth a shot to apply the 1.1.3 patch. Sure, you'll be stuck back on AT&T again, but at least the thing will be functional:

To upgrade, we put the phone in recovery mode, then connected to iTunes and restored/ upgraded. After the phone had finished upgrading, it would not work with our already valid ATT sim, so we had to activate the phone using iTunes. This is where we ran into some trouble, because after activating the iPhone under our existing account, the phone still did not show any signal and would not activate to our account. We restarted the phone and just like magic, were taken directly to the home screen. - Confirmed: Bricked iPhones Rise From the Grave With Firmware 1.1.3

The other news is that 1.1.3 has already been jailbroken (well, it was a hardware jailbreak first, then this software-jailbreak). Either way, people looking to get native apps back on their 1.1.3 iPhones will need to wait a bit longer for public consumption -- or just wait for the SDK to finally be official in very short order.

Oh - one last piece of 1.1.3 news, you're no longer stuck with it if you prefer the older version, but the downgrade isn't the easiest thing on earth.

Well there have been a few more pieces of news tricking out about 1.1.3. Top of the list has to be the fact that it kills EDGE data for GoPhone users. When Christopher wrote in and said he's been without data for 48 hours and counting my iPhone wailed a bit for him. There's other oddities too, like SMS messages appearing out of order. It appears that I spoke too quickly when I said that Apple had the best ROM update method EVARS over at WMExperts.

But 1.1.3 also has some good surprises - the max number of SMS messages an iPhone can hold has been lifted from a crazy-low 1000 to around 75,000. That might be enough. You can also finally manually manage your music and movies for finer-tuned control of what goes on your iPhone. Of course, there are also all the previously discussed benefits.

In the mixed category - 1.1.3 switches Gmail over to IMAP access automatically. This is good news for most - IMAP is clearly superior to POP. But the change happens without telling user that deleting Gmail email on the iPhone acts is going to be a little different now. On POP, "Delete = Archive," so you could use delete to clear our your inbox Willy-Nilly. On IMAP, "Delete = Delete," so use a little caution.

The iPhone FAQ is reporting that the issue we've seen with the earlier leaked 1.1.3 ROM update holds with the official ROM update. To wit: if you decide to downgrade your iPhone back to 1.1.2 (or even earlier), you're phone will think that your SIM is invalid no matter what. You'll quasi-brick your iPhone. I say "quasi" because it does seem you can safely upgrade to 1.1.3 again.

Anyway, the advice that Phone different has given you again and again still holds true: if you've done anything non-standard to your iPhone, stay the heck away from new updates until the hackers have had a chance to put it through its paces. Then again, the new location feature is super sweet, sweet enough that even if you do love Lights Out, it's probably worth it to upgrade. After all, the SDK is getting released next month.

Big ups to hrmpf.com for remembering a certain Apple patent: "Portable Electronic Device with Interface Reconfiguration Mode." Basically it shows a portable device clearly letting you know you're in "reconfiguration" mode by way of jiggly icons. While I personally don't much like the jigglies, I will admit that, as rener and archie say, it does make it unmistakable that you're in the "move stuff around" mode.

So either Gear Live somehow managed to snag a leaked version of 1.1.3 or they've perpetrated perhaps the greatest "gotcha" in recent memory. Probably the former, as it's looking more and more like 1.1.3 is the real deal. So what's coming (and what's likely to get a mention at MacWorld) is pretty neat:

• Ability to add bookmarks to the SpringBoard (homescreen)
• Ability to rearrange programs via the nausea-inducing "jiggle mode"
• Ability to (finally!) send SMSs to multiple people
• Google Maps gains the neat tower-triangulation Tower Tagging* location trick, plus a hybrid satellite/map directions

Of course, there are some things that we figured would be easy adds that a missing - namely Stereo Bluetooth support. Still and all, it looks like a decent enough upgrade and it's clearly a step towards getting the iPhone ready for that upcoming SDK. As for when the rest of us will get to take this 1.1.3 step, that's still shrouded in mystery.

*Edit: not triangulation, but 'tagging.' See comment by Archie (and septimus, in a minute). Thanks!