Ever since upgrading to iOS 4.0 my iPhone 3G performed like a piece of crap. I’ve seen that Apple published an iOS 4.1 beta on its iPhone developer network website and I was willing to give it a try to see if there are any performance improvements. To make it short: yes, there are. While it’s not as good as with v3.x the phone is a lot more responsive than with v4.0 or v4.0.1, without having to turn off Spotlight indexing! Let’s hope these changes make it to the 4.1 GM.

To activate iOS 4.1 beta your iPhone’s UDID needs to be registered with an Apple iPhone SDK account ($99 a year). As every account comes with 100 UDID slots for iDevices you just need to find a developer who adds your iPhone’s UDID to the beta SDK list. Some do it for free, some charge a couple of bucks to do it. I may have one or two UDID slots left in my dev account so you may want to leave a comment if you want to have your iPhone registered (please provide the UDID for the iPhone- but don’t ask me where to look it up). You also have to find the beta firmware on your own (Torrent sites may be a good place to start).

Btw. initally I tried to install iOS 4.1 beta on my iPhone 3G without a registered UDID. I used redsn0w 0.9.5b5-5, iOS 4.0, iOS 4.1 beta and iPhoneExplorer to remove the beta-tag in SystemVersion.plist. While I was able to activate my iPhone 3G that way I lost 3G/WiFi network connectivity. The problem seemed to be related to DNS. Making/taking calls, SMS worked perfectly though. This way of activating a phone most likely requires a new redsn0w version in order to work properly.

Lately, I always get an error message when I try to sync my iPhone in iTunes. The message simply says “The iPhone cannot by synced. The required file cannot be found.”

Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t say exactly what file is missing. While playing with the sync options in iTunes I found out, that the problem is related to Apple Aperture 3 in my case. If you’re using iPhoto instead of Apple Aperture, you may find a solution in this Apple support note. If you’re getting this error message in iTunes and you’re syncing your Aperture 3 library (or parts of it) to your iPhone, I may have a solution for you. Read more »

Here’s a review of iPhone and iPod touch apps that can be very useful to DSLR photographers. On one hand I was looking for iPhone apps which calculate sunrise and sunset times for a given location or even calculate the so called “blue hour”. On the other hand I was looking for apps that calculate depth of field, hyperfocal distance and flash exposure. I also had a look at some GPS coordinate tracker apps but due to (deliberate) limitations in the iPhone OS most of these apps don’t really work great. More on that later on. Read more »

I’m using Google Calendar Sync at work to synchronize all my Outlook meetings to my Google Calendar. This works pretty well. It even enables me to synchronize my Google Calendar to my iPhone using the MS Exchange server infrastructure from a company called Nuevasync. Nuevasync also supports push technology to send new meetings to my iPhone. This is a very nice way to synchronize all my private and work calendar data automatically and immediately to my iPhone without having to use (and to pay for) a .me account.

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2G iPhones previously unlocked with IPSF (iPhoneSimFree) still work after patching them with the new PwnageTool 2.0 from iPhone-dev team. I successfully updated my 1.1.4 IPSF iPhone with the original 3.9 bootloader to the new 2.0 firmware without any problems. I was using ZiPhone to update to 1.1.4 but that didn’t seem to be a problem. Signal.app is not needed as PwnageTool unlocks the baseband with BootNeuter 2.0 anyway, at least if you use all the default settings in PwnageTool’s simple mode. Your iPhone’s baseband will be upgraded to 04.05.04_G in the process. Thanks to everyone involved for making this happen! Yee-haw!

By the way: I choose to setup the iPhone as a new iPhone instead of restoring a backup the first time I connected it to iTunes after updating.

Things you may need first:

• PwnageTool 2.0 mirror: PwnageTool_2.0.zip
• Boot loader 3.9 and 4.6: boot_loader.zip
• 2G 2.0 Firmware: iPhone1,1_2.0_5A347_Restore.ipsw

My iPhone now runs the new version 1.1.4. IPSF still works! Here’s what I did:

• Downloaded ZiPhone 2.5.
  • If you’re runningVista, make sure you run the executable with administrator permissions
• Downloaded iTunes 7.6.1 and the 1.1.4 update.
• Made a backup of all my iPhone settings using iTunes. Read more »

The 1.1.3 soft-upgrade is called a soft-upgrade because it won’t update your baseband firmware to the 1.1.3 software level (04.03.13_G). This was necessary because as of today there’s no anySIM hack for the new baseband.

Added 2008-2-23: You don’t need Singal.app if you run anySIM 1.1.3 on your IPSF iPhone. I just tested it today and it works!

Added 2008-2-29: Looking for 1.1.4? See here!  

If you own an iPhoneSimFree’ed (IPSF) 1.1.2 iPhone (or 1.1.1) with the 3.9 bootloader you’re able to fully upgrade to 1.1.3 including baseband! Why would you want the new baseband if you could run 1.1.3 with the older baseband firmware? I don’t really have an answer to that. I just wanted to make sure the software and the baseband firmware in my iPhone are on the same level as intended by Apple’s software engineers.

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