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I just updated my iPhone to version 3.0. It was quick and painless, although my jailbreak and carrier unlock have been removed by it. Fortunately the iPhone Dev Team crew are promising to release their jailbreak tools for 3.0 tonight, and unlock tools (called Ultrasn0w ) on Friday.

I don’t need the unlock since I’m on an O2 SIM anyway, but its always nice to keep one’s options open… and to use cheap foreign SIM cards when roaming.

I particularly like the new spotlight search, which will search the entire phone (including emails, music tracks, podcasts, contacts, etc) for content matching your keywords. See the screenshot below for example.

Also, some long overdue features that should have been present from day 1, such as MMS messaging and copy & paste finally arrived. Its free it seems to have come with no performance penalty, although I have read about a few people on boards.ie experiencing difficulty performing the upgrade and having to wipe and restore their devices.

I still recommend it. This update is available to iPod Touch users as well but Apple will charge you for it

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And its easy too, but there’s a catch. It needs to have bootloader version 5.08, which mine conveniently does. If you have 5.09 or newer, you’re still screwed for now.

Full and idiot-proof instructions on iClarified. Essentially all it does is downgrade the baseband firmware of your iPhone to a version that the existing soft unlock tools work with. It worked perfectly on my O2 iPhone.

Skype for the iPhone and iPod touch was recently released on the Apple AppStore, and it works just fine once you stay on a wifi connection. The app has built-in restrictions to prevent you from making Skype voice calls when on a cellular network, mainly because of Apple’s cosy deals with their various network partners around the world.

Fortunately, clever people have made a way to work around this restriction using a little package called VoIPover3G from Cydia (Cydia is the package manager of choice for jailbroken iphones).

Full instructions are here. VoIPover3G has been updated since that article was written to have Skype support built-in, so you can skip the steps involving editing of the plist file.

On a geeky side note, you can actually run nano directly on the iPhone when you SSH to it rather than copying the file to a computer, editing it there and then copying it back

Skype over 3G on iPhone

That’s the end result – working Skype calls via the mobile operator’s network, charged at data rates! Although if you are on 3, I would have my doubts about it working. They seem to traffic-shape the crap out of VoIP from my experiences with Fring when I was with them.

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You may have noticed a sudden burst of short and poorly formatted posts here. This is because I’ve linked Wordpress with my Twitter account using this Wordpress plugin. Any old shite that I tweet to Twitter is getting crossposted to here for posterity. New posts here also get spammed out to my (very few) Twitter followers also.

I wasn’t particularly bothered with Twitter in the past since they shut down free SMS to Irish numbers, but now that I have the iPhone I’m using Twitterific on it, which is just as good.
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I finally cracked and bought myself an iPhone 3G. So far, I love it. Its not the best phone ever, considering its missing some features common to pretty much every other modern mobile phone, but as a mobile internet device and ipod all in one, it wins.

That said, Apple went and changed the charging voltage of the iPod range from 12V in the old ones to 5V in the current ones, meaning my car’s iPod kit will not charge the iPhone. Apparently there’s some kind of adapter out there that will sort it out.

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