Have a jailbroken iPhone and wish you could better control how your actual phone application behaves? StartDial, available in Cydia now, will allow you to alter what tabs your phone application will open and when.

StartDial is a simple tweak that allows you to chose the view to start with when the Phone application is launched.

Most people either want the phone application to launch their contacts, favorites, or the dial pad initially. StartDial will force your iPhone to load whatever tab you choose every single time.

In addition to setting which tab the phone app opens to initially you can also remove the Visual Voicemail tab altogether. This is one of the main reasons I love this modification. I never have to worry about anyone going through my voicemails if I let someone borrow my iPhone or I lose it. It’s a useful feature for users who may keep sensitive information in their voicemail.

You can also set the phone app to automatically launch to the Recents tab if you have any missed calls. So if you see that you have 4 missed calls on your lockscreen but left the phone app on the keypad tab, it will automatically take you to the recents tab when you attempt to check your missed calls.

It’s pretty simple for a jailbreak mod but packs a lot of power depending on how you choose to use it.

StarDial is already available in Cydia and will run on any iPhone running iOS 4 or higher. If you’re looking for even more tweaks and utilities to install, check out our guide to the best jailbreak applications for iOS 5.

• Free – Cydia Link

Even more jailbreak resources:

• How to jailbreak guides
• Jailbreak apps, hacks, and themes
• General jailbreak and unlock help forums

SuperSwitcher is a new jailbreak mod in Cydia that offers extended functionality and settings access to the Fast App Switcher on your iPhone.

Don’t you just hate searching for your favorite app icon in between so many Springboard pages? Wish you could just “bookmark” your favorite apps in the multitasking bar? Now you can with SuperSwitcher!

With SuperSwitcher you can bookmark your 9 favorite apps in the menu above the multitasking bar, and the apps can be set through Settings. But that’s not all! You can also change the system settings right from the menu above the multitasking bar!

• Toggle Bluetooth
• Toggle WiFi
• Change volume and brightness settings
• Respring
• Reboot
• Safe Mode
• Tweet, SMS, Mail or Call anyone on the fly

SuperSwitcher takes your multitasking bar to the next level!

This is a really great mod that adds a lot of value to the Fast App Switcher. You can customize your favorite apps for instant access, control brightness and other settings on-the-fly and then some.

If you run into any trouble you can always jump into our Jailbreak and Unlock forums or post it in the comments!

• $.99 — Cydia Store Link

A prototype of an Apple phone has been uncovered and it dates all the way back to 1983. Designer Hartmut Esslinger came up with the design whilst working for Apple on other projects such as the Apple IIc. Wikipedia has it noted that Esslinger was contracted to Apple in a $1,000,000 a year deal.

In 1982 he entered into an exclusive $1,000,000 per year contract with Apple Computer to create a design strategy which transformed Apple from a “Silicon Valley Start-Up” into a global brand. Setting up shop in California for the first time, Esslinger and Frogdesign created the “Snow White design language” which was applied to all Apple product lines from 1984 to 1990, commencing with the Apple IIc and including the Macintosh computer.

Source: iPhoneFreakz via iClarified, Wikipedia

Google has updated their Google Voice app for the iPhone, including complete integration with Sprint to allow calls to be sent directly to the 3rd party app rather than the stock Phone app. Here’s the complete update log:

• Multi-recipient texting, with contact autocomplete.
• Sprint integration support: sends all calls to the native dialer when the phone is integrated with Sprint
• Multi-line text entry field with character count.
• 1-touch Copy/Paste in dialpad

This is rather big news, and somewhat surprising that Sprint would allow this to happen. Given the nature of most carriers these days, letting subscribers bypass their network completely is a good indication that Sprint has their ears open and are actually listening to the requests of their user-base.

Google Voice is available in the App Store for free and compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch.

• Free – App Store Link

Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.

Sprint and Verizon will offer the iPhone 4S with an unlocked micro-SIM card slot according to information given to Macworld. The iPhone 4S is the first iPhone that can be classed as a world phone which means it has a GSM and CDMA radio. This is particularly useful if travelling overseas where CDMA networks are few and far between.

In simple terms, this means that users of Sprint or Verizon who buy an iPhone 4S and travel overseas will have the ability to install a local micro-SIM card in their phone; to use on GSM networks. AT&T will still offer the iPhone 4S with a locked micro-SIM card slot; which means users can roam on overseas GSM networks but do so via AT&T agreements with local carriers. This leads to a huge increase in call and data charges with this method.

If you use Sprint or Verizon and travel overseas, having an unlocked phone could save you a considerable amount of money. The downside however is that your number will be different when using a local micro-SIM card. Sprint’s iPhone 4S will be unlocked from day one but Verizon will do it on request after 60 days; as long as your account is in good standing.

Source: Macworld

CNN has updated their iPhone and iPad apps with the ability to watch CNN live TV.

Now you can watch your favorite CNN shows LIVE on your CNN Apps for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. We’ve added CNN TV live – 24/7 – to all the great features that you love about your app.

• Watch LIVE CNN TV, video coverage of live events, and video clips
• Get the latest breaking news, US, world, politics, health and entertainment headlines
• Be the first to know with breaking news alerts pushed to your home screen
• View, record and submit video and photo iReports directly from your phone
• Get local news and weather for cities across the U.S.
• Share stories via e-mail, SMS, Twitter and Facebook

CNN is free on the iPhone and iPad but requires a cable subscription. Screenshots after the break.

[iPhone iTunes link] [iPad iTunes link]

Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.

Not that many of us are Bond, Borne, or Sarah Walker types, but just in case you might be a target for cellular call eavesdropping, iOS 5 will now warn you when you’re talking over an unsecured network. If you’re a high value target, you’re probably avoiding even the secure ones, but if you’re simply living next to a nosy neighbor with too much time and Radio Shack kit on his or her hands, it could be handy to know when you’re vulnerable.

Anyone glad for this warning?

Have you ever wondered how to quickly reject a call when your iPhone is locked? This can be especially important when you are in an meeting and have forgotten to turn off your iPhone beforehand. Yes, this is a basic how to, but for those who do not already know, it can prove invaluable.

When you receive a call on your locked iPhone, “slide to unlock” will change to “slide to answer”, with no “reject” or “ignore” option in sight, but you can still do it:

• To ignore/silence an incoming call, just press the sleep/wake button once (that’s the button which is at the very top of your iPhone)
• To reject/send an incoming call to voicemail, press the sleep/wake button twice.

Let us know how it works for you and if you have any questions, ask in the comments!

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to dailytips@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

It looks as if there’s yet another Phone.app security hole, this time in iOS 4.1 that allows someone to get around a passcode locked iPhone, gain access to the owner’s contact list, make calls and send emails to anyone in said contact list.  From MacStories:

“To reproduce the bug, make sure to have a passcode lock turned on and lock your device. In the lockscreen, tap on Emergency Call in the lower left corner. Now type a non-existent emergency number, I tried #946494. Start the call, and as soon as the red button appear hit the sleep button. You’ll be brought to the contact list.”

The issue will most-likely get patched by Apple in the 4.2 update coming later this month, but it’s not the first time the emergency call screen has been exploited. Both iOS 2.1 and iOS 2.0.2 suffered from passcode lock bugs. Hopefully Apple pays extra attention and really secures Phone.app this time.

We were able to recreate the issue in the video above.  Any readers out there seeing the same results?  Let us know your thoughts on this in the comments below!

UPDATE: This bug appears to already be fixed in iOS 4.2 beta, which is due to be released in November.

[MacStories]

by Andrew Wray

Mozilla has an interesting Seabird concept phone rendering posted to YouTube. It looks great but disappointingly it’s not real, contains technology that doesn’t yet exist at the consumer scale, and is built on top of Android.

The Android part makes me sad, not because it’s Android but because it’s not MozillaOS (GeckoOS?). Google is basically doing now with Android what Microsoft did with Windows in the 90s — providing manufacturers with something they can use pretty much off the shelf rather than rolling their own. So just like Dell, Lenovo, Sony, et. al never bothered to innovate or create great new PC OS, no one who doesn’t already have a mobile OS (Apple, RIM, HP via Palm, Microsoft) is going to bother making one any more. Even the so-called Facebook phone looks like it’s going to be built on top of Android.

That means, like Dell, Lenovo, Sony, et. al the innovation will turn to hardware, and differentiation will be left to software skins, bloatware, and stickers on the box. Impressive, perhaps, in the Alienware sort of way. But imagine if Mozilla was starting in the browser space now, would they just use Chromium instead of their own Gecko as the foundation for Firefox? Would Facebook have built their social network on the Twitter API?

For a while mobile OS were explosively innovative. We went from Newton to PalmOS to Windows Mobile to BlackBerry to Symbian to iPhone/iOS to Android to webOS and all sorts of experimental Linux-based OS that may or may not see the light of day. It was so much more exciting than the Windows/Mac/Linux pace of PC OS.

Sure it’s hard making an OS, even with BSD Unix or Linux at its core. Sure going Android would certainly save Mozilla or Facebook or Verizon (yeah, went there), a lot of time and money, but part of me hoped we were just at some mid-point in the mobile revolution, that we’d still have the chance to be blown away by an iOS or Android or webOS again. That we wouldn’t have to wait for the next big transition — to neuralOS or whatever it will be — before we get that feeling of everything being new again.

So great concept, great tech, spectacular vision, but that even in a video rendering this wasn’t running an amazing MozillaOS as thought-provoking in software as the device looks in hardware, depresses me. (I still want those pico projectors and remotes.)

Video after the break

[Android Central]

How do you place calls on your iPhone? To be frank, I’m usually so busy doing other things I sometimes forget my iPhone is in fact a phone — until it rings and yanks me out of whatever game or social network or website I’m engaged with. But when I need to reach someone else, that ability to place calls is suddenly the most important aspect of the device again. That’s why we’re curious how you use it.

• Do you stick with Favorites? Currently you can double click the home button to bring up your call favorites then tap to call. It’s fast-ish and a fairly traditional way to call on a phone.
• Is Recents the real Favorites? Steve Jobs joked about this when he introduced the iPhone, but ironically for many of us the people who we call, and call us, the most are the ones we want to talk to and they’re always only a couple taps away via the Phone app’s Recents tab.
• Old school type out the number? There’s a dialing pad for those who still manage to remember phone numbers on their own, and some people still like to actually tap out those numbers in full. If you’re a speedy dialer, just tap Phone, then the dial pad, then the digits. Hey, it works for one of our writers!
• Are you all about Spotlight? Switch the double-click preference or just swipe left from the main home screen and Spotlight pops up. Start typing a few letters of the name, or a couple letters of the first, space, a couple letters of the last name and your contact pops up, tap that to get a list of their numbers and tap a number to call. Not super fast but if you have a huge number of contacts to manage, it can be super efficient. You can even do a combo – tap the Phone app or Contacts app to bring up the contacts list, scroll to the top to get a dedicated contact search on.
• VoiceControl for the iPhone 3GS? It’s only available on the latest model, but if that’s the one you have you can hold down on the home button, or tap the call button on supported Bluetooth headsets, to bring up the iPhone’s VoiceControl. Then you just say “Call”, the person’s name, and the number you want (mobile, home, work, etc.). Mostly, it gets it right. Mostly.
• Is there an App Store app for that? The iPhone lets third party App Store apps plug in to the Contacts database so there are a number of apps that offer different ways to organize and approach your contacts, from social circles to business or friend groups. Some are smart enough to narrow down who you want to call more often or in what context. If you have a favorite app for calling, let us know.
• Google Voice or VoIP the only option? Is your iPhone’s Phone app for decoration only, with all your calls being placed via the Google Voice web app or a VoIP app like Skype?
• Data detectors — sometimes. The iPhone helpfully turns any phone numbers it finds in emails, notes, calendars, etc. into links that can start a call. For business people especially, just tapping the phone number to follow up with a phone call can be a time saver.

Let us know how you use your iPhone as an actual-to-Alexander-Graham-Bell phone, and if you have any special tips or tricks, let us know!

So you might have heard that the iPhone 3G was going to retail for $199 from AT&T. I’ve already covered how it isn’t technically $199 for current iPhone users. And you heard Rene tell you that $199 is less than the notorious price DROP of the iPhone. Well TiPb has been wondering how Apple settled on dropping the price so dramatically.

And we settled on a story, kind of—more like a collection of reasons. We’ve analyzed the outcome back and forth, from reverse and from the beginning. And we think we have come to a conclusion (or at the very least, a conspiracy theory). In a purely speculative story, I’ll give you my opinion on how we reached $199.

Read on for Apple’s Path to $199

Apple Wanted to Revolutionize the Phone Industry

They were hoping that the iPhone was going to be ridiculously popular (it was) and that foreign carriers would see such popularity and ask for it on their network as well. Therefore in that case, Apple could then leverage the iPhone’s popularity into folding the carriers into having the same relationship with Apple as AT&T ‘enjoys’. Essentially making the carrier powerless to Apple’s demands and eventually change the way carriers work.

Do you guys remember the uniqueness of the original iPhone? This was a phone that toyed with AT&T, basically ignoring everything that the Death Star Company wanted. When AT&T asked for prototypes pre-iPhone launch, Apple reportedly created fake models to placate them. Apple created a new iPhone-specific data plan that AT&T had to abide by—$20 for unlimited data and 200 SMS. Apple created a new activation process that essentially cut AT&T out of the loop. You activate via iTunes, not with AT&T. Apple created a new business model for the iPhone that included revenue sharing—AT&T is paying Apple for users using AT&T’s service, just simply brilliant business. Phone Carriers don’t typically get thrown around like this.

It almost worked

With the gray market in full affect, Apple lost their leverage. Foreign Carriers had no desire to bend to Apple’s unprecedented demands because anyone who really wanted an iPhone could easily get an iPhone through the gray market. And those using unlocked iPhone on a foreign carrier’s network would HAVE to work with the current data plans in play. Therefore we have iPhone users across the world using the iPhone on network’s aimed to rip every dollar from the consumer.

What could Apple offer the carriers now? From the carrier’s standpoint, the money gained by having unlocked iPhones on their pricey data network was worth more than agreeing to revenue sharing models and affordable data plans. Not to mention the fact that when a foreign carrier introduced the iPhone to their country’s market per ‘exclusivity contract’ it would only give unlockers a chance to use OTHER networks in the same country. So much for exclusivity, right. The money spent paying Apple for ‘exclusive’ rights was better not spent at all.

Apple still needed to increase marketshare

Back then, the idea was that foreign carriers would see the benefits of having an exclusive relationship with Apple and that would offset the costs that they would have to pay in a revenue sharing model. But with the gray market, all the foreign carriers had to do was stand pat and wait for Apple to come around because everyone knew they NEEDED to sell 10 million units in 2008. And that meant expanding to more countries.

So when the clock started ticking and Apple realized they had little to no leverage, they folded to the carriers demands. The carriers were too entrenched in their markets, they had too much power and Apple’s only leverage was lost. Nothing about the carriers was going to change.

AT&T demanded change

So the revenue sharing disappeared. So did the activation process. So did the iPhone-specific plan. AT&T isn’t going to do it Apple’s way anymore because Apple folded to the demands of foreign carriers, thus giving AT&T a loophole to subsidize, raise data prices, and basically conform the iPhone to any phone in AT&T’s lineup.

So Apple needed to re-strategize

So how else could Apple revolutionize the cell phone industry? By aiming their attack at the other party. Cell phone makers. A $199 price point for the iPhone 3G will force people to notice and overhaul the system from the device end. In fact, the Samsung Instinct dropped to $199 after the Apple announcement. I’m sure RIM and other companies will have to follow suit. How could a company justify charging so much for such feature-strapped phones?

So Why $199?

But to be bold enough to declare it at $199. That’s a direct challenge to RIM, to Palm, to HTC, to Sony. $199 is the price point you have to hit and if you don’t, consumers are going to wonder why is a phone that’s not as full featured as the iPhone cost more than the iPhone? They are forcing cell phone makers to change their strategies and not simply rely on the carriers doing all the work for them.

A $199 price point can realistically put the iPhone in the hands of a lot of potential customers. They’re attacking the situation in reverse of what they originally intended. Putting it in the hands of the most customers possible and gaining market share to create change. With a larger install base, the App Store and iTunes Wi-Fi store become instant money makers. With users falling in love with the iPhone’s usability, Apple gets their leverage back. Apple believes that when people finally get to own the iPhone, they’ll always own an iPhone. Cell phone makers, you’re going to have to catch up fast. Cell phone carriers, Apple is still going to come after you.

This plan actually makes more sense than Apple’s original business model, when people fall in love with the iPhone, Apple would have a dedicated user base ready to follow Apple and the iPhone wherever they go, to whomever carrier it happens to be.

What does the future hold then?

And what about expanding the iPhone platform, which is a natural progression in creating cell phones. What will an iPhone nano retail at? $99? Can Apple deal with the PR-nightmare it would have if they were to raise prices in the next editions?

Or could Apple simply put the iPhone in the most hands possible and then prep themselves to go completely unlocked? Could they manage to offer a $199 price point without carrier subsidies?

Final Thoughts

Or maybe I’m just a conspiracy theorist. Remember this is all speculation and opinion. Apple simply just could have realized they couldn’t keep pace with the hype of the iPhone 3G and determined the best way to have conversation was to significantly drop the price. Shock and awe. Or maybe not.

What do you think? Why do you think Apple priced it at $199 and do you think the iPhone will ever go completely unlocked? Comment on this Wait-a-Thon post for a chance to win a $100 iTunes Gift Card!