iPhone News Updated

iPhone 5 car kit - time to build your own?

Still waiting on an iPhone 5 car kit? It’s time to get creative.

For me the biggest frustration in upgrading to the iPhone 5 was breaking compatibility with my long-serving TomTom car kit. The iPhone 5’s change in size and connector rendered it incompatible with most iPhone car cradles except the handful which grip the phone on its side — such as Kensington’s SoundWave Amplifying Car Mount or Belkin’s Window Mount for iPhone and iPod.

I got sick of waiting for TomTom to release a new car kit with a Lightning connector, so I bought myself a Belkin Window Mount. I like it in part because you can adjust the grips to support wider devices, offering a certain level of future-proofing. Unfortunately the Belkin’s suction cup is less tolerant of the curved glass at the edge of your windscreen. I needed to place it a few inches further away from the edge of the windscreen than where the TomTom sat, before I could get a reliable seal. This moved the cradle further into my field of vision but not so much as to be dangerous. The arm is very flexible, and longer than it looks in the image on the Belkin website, letting me bend it back towards the edge of the windscreen so the phone can still sit in the corner rather than above the steering wheel.

Read the rest of this entry »

The First iPhone Jailbreak Took a Whopping 74 Steps

If you’re at all up on the whole jailbreaking scene, you know that the long-awaited iPhone 5 jailbreak is probably maybe definitely coming today, finally. And even though there’s been a long wait, the exploit is definitely going to be a hell of a lot better than the first ones were. Jailbreaking used to take 74 steps.

In anticipation of the upcoming exploit, Cult of Mac dug up some info on the first ever jailbreak, and it makes modern-day stuff seem like a breeze. Mostly because it is. This MacRumors thread from way back in 2007 details the steps for cracking open the original iPhone, running iOS 1.1.1. All 74 of them, including such gems as:

11. Search for the ASCII string “noexec” in the file. The second hit

Read the rest of this entry »