Stash Bits: Hacking Up The Biggest Selling Smartphone, Unlocking It For 3G

Apple may have bagged 10 million iPhone sales this year but you don’t care about sales figures (unless your inner geek needs some justification for the popularity of the device) but what you’re more interested in is what you can’t do with it. Well step on down because hacking up the iPhone just got better and more intriguing. Fortunately you don’t need to drag your unwilling little bundle of glass and plastic into the tool shed to make it more useful.

Run Apps In The Background, Don’t Wait For Push Notification

Battery life may be everything in a mobile device, especially so when it comes to the iPhone. Doing so many things at the same time requires some serious juice sucking but switching in and out of Apps can be just as frustrating. Available via Cydia, (the supposed cooler kid on the block for 3rd party App distribution) Backgrounder allows you to continue running Apps even while you’re on the Home Screen. For now there’s no activity monitor to show which App is porking out on your CPU but enhancements are sure to come with future updates.

Of course there are some downsides like the need to Jailbreak your iPhone and while it’s easy to do with the Dev Team’s Pwnage Tool, the faint of heart won’t take too kindly the remote possibility of bricking their iPhones. As Arstechnica points out, system sounds can disrupt music playback with no way to resume playback unless you switch back to that App.

Via: The iPhone Blog

SOS: Secure Our Screen

New Text Messages are displayed prominently on the iPhone’s lock screen but if you’ve turned off the quick glance feature, still rethink what your lovers, stock analysts and mafia connections are texting you. Sure the new text notification doesn’t reveal much at first glance but if you plunge an iPhone into emergency call mode, incoming texts can be read clearly.

Unfortunately this didn’t happen for something useful like further exposure to AIG’s use of their bailout bonus but to bag on a 12 year old’s love life.

Via: Karl Kraft

Unlocking The 3G iPhone? Not Anytime Soon

Any bit of hackery includes some frustration and the do-it-yourself approach is less than ideal for some but the wait times can be just as paralyzing. Unfortunately, an iPhone 3G unlock isn’t coming right away. One of the main problems hindering a full Software unlock was the OS freezing up after the Dev Team severed communication between it and the Baseband. Restoring the iPhone resulted in a botched fix but the issue has been remedied. However, this issue cannot be reproduced but a step has been made in the right direction, it wasn’t as big as everyone hoped however.

Via: The iPhone Blog