Unlocking the Iphone

Apple’s iPhone is a marvel of modern technology, but getting it to work in Thailand can be equally impressive

An American business associate who frequents Thailand gave me an Apple iPhone as a gift. I should be pleased to have one of the first iPhones in Thailand, but there is a problem. The iPhone has a built-in dual locking system that prohibits unauthorized activation of its internal programs, while it “locks” the phone to AT&T, a US mobile operator.

Locked in a box

Only AT&T is authorized to activate and unlock iPhones. But since AT&T does not operate in Thailand, I have a very expensive, iconoclastic icon of advanced technology that can only be used as a fancy and lifeless paperweight, a sort of snow globe without the snow.

Solution: I’ll ask Apple Thailand for help. After all, Apple has its money and I have an iPhone. I just need to activate and unlock the phone so I can subscribe to a local phone service, and everyone will be happy. Right? Wrong! Surely, the famed mobile phone hackers at MBK can unlock it. Right? Maybe.

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The Highlights of Apple’s New iPods

A hands-on look at some of the distinctive features of the iPod Nano and iPod Touch.

Palm-sized Nano

Leading up to Apple’s grand unveiling of its refreshed iPod line, the chatter was all about the so-called “phat” iPod Nano. Turns out the “phat” Nano is anything but: Sure, it’s wider than the previous slim Nano stick; but, its form is actually svelte, stylish, and lightweight. The new Nano is packed with more capabilities–namely, video playback and casual gaming–than its music-only predecessor. Plus, it carries a rated battery life of 24 hours for audio, and 5 hours for video–about enough to get you through the first two installments of The Pirates of the Caribbean series.

How Far We’ve Come?

In early 2005, the second-generation 6GB Apple iPod Mini, seen at left, shipped. That model sported a 1.67-inch monochrome display, weighed 3.6 ounces, and measured 3.6 by 2 by 0.5 inches. At the time, its size was considered fairly compact. Fast forward more than two years later to the new iPod Nano (the first Nano replaced the Mini in Apple’s lineup), seen at right. The tiny Nano is a marvel, with a 2-inch color screen and less than half the Mini’s weight and half its depth. The Nano weighs just 1.7 ounces, and measures 2.8 by 2.1 by 0.26 inches.

Stack o’Colors

The new Nano comes in 4GB and 8GB capacities, and carries an attractive price of $149 and $199, respectively. The Nano ships in five colors: The 4GB model only comes in silver, while 8GB model ships in the full color spectrum of metallic teal and metallic pale green, silver, black, and Apple’s socially conscious (Product) Red. Notice the Nano’s remarkably slim profile in this view: It’s barely more than a quarter-of-an-inch thick.

iPod Touch

The iPhone’s most innovative features characterize the best of the iPod Touch: The 3.5-inch multi-touch display for slide-and-glide and pinch-and-squeeze navigation; Cover Flow music navigation; an accelerometer that automatically detects the device’s position and orients the screen accordingly; integrated YouTube; 802.11b/g wireless and the full-on graphics of the Safari Web browser. Even better, it does so in a device that’s lighter and thinner than the iPhone–the Touch is just 0.3 inches thick. The 8GB version will sell for $299; the 16GB version will sell for 16GB.

Choose Your Own Headphones

The iPod Touch uses a standard 3.5mm headset jack, which means you can use the headphones of your choice with this model, no adapters required. This is an improvement over the iPhone, which has the headset jack inset into the unit, and requires an awkward dongle in order to accommodate a headphone other than the one the unit ships with. You may want your own headset of choice for all that music you’ll be listening to: Apple rates the Touch for up to 22 hours of audio play, and 5 hours of video play.

Coming Soon

The iPod Nano and the newly dubbed iPod Classic (80GB for $249, a gargantuan 160GB for $349) will ship soon. The Nano could be in stores by Friday, this weekend–or even Monday. According to Apple’s online store, a Nano ordered today would ship out for delivery on Monday, at the earliest. The iPod Touch is expected to be available by September 28.

Battle of the stats: Blu-ray beats HD DVD

Another month, another consumer electronics show, and once again the backers of the rival HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats come to attempt to persuade us their favoured format is winning the war. The IFA show in Berlin last week was no exception – so how is battle faring now?

The BD boys were up first, pointing to their format’s lead in US for the 12-month period from 12 August 2006. According to Nielsen VideoScan sales stats, HD DVD outsold BD until around Christmas, but since then BD has been ahead – though it’s come very close to falling behind on a couple of occasions.

Over 2m BDs have been sold in the US up to 12 August 2007, 1.71m of them in 2007 alone. Ignoring sales before 1 January 2007, some 66.3 per cent of next-gen discs sales were BDs. That figure rises to 70 per cent in Europe, according to numbers from market watcher GfK, whose stats were used by the Blu-ray camp to claim BD has been outselling HD DVD here by a factor of 3:1 since the PS3 arrived in Europe in March.

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Has the iPhone really been unlocked?

Over the past two months, the unlocked iPhone has become the hi-tech equivalent of Bigfoot: chased around north America by geeks, but rarely seen and possibly completely fictitious.

That all changed last week when Apple’s flagship touchscreen mobile phone was finally hacked to run on any mobile network, not just America’s AT&T. The breakthrough came in the unlikely shape of New Jersey teenager George Hotz. Armed with a soldering iron and a suite of software, the 17-year-old became an instant celebrity when he managed to get his iPhone running with a T-Mobile Sim card. But his hack was daunting and dangerous – so it was no surprise when two other sources claimed they had easier alternatives.

One website, iPhoneSimFree.com, said it had a working unlocking process. So far the only confirmation has come from the website Engadget, which claims to have seen it in action.

Another group, Unique phone, boasted that it would make an unlocking code public – before pulling out at the last minute, claiming legal pressure from AT&T.

Some pundits say they smell a rat, and it would not be surprising if these remain shrouded in mystery. There is, after all, plenty of reason for hackers to claim an iPhone; with gadget-hounds in Europe and the US desperate to use their existing Sim cards in an iPhone, the promise of easy unlocking could prove very lucrative indeed.

But the prospect of a few dollars won’t bother Hotz, who has already cashed in by auctioning off his hacked handset.

“I traded it for a sweet Nissan 350Z and three 8GB iPhones,” he said, making the deal worth in the region of £25,000. “I leave for college tomorrow, and this has been a great end to a great summer.”

The Future Of Mobile Tech: Next Year’s Notebooks Will Be Worth Waiting For

Good things come to those who wait, says the proverb. Right now, this is very appropriate if you’re in the market for a new notebook. Unless you’re in a hurry, you may want to keep your wallet in your pocket — there are new technologies around the corner you won’t want to miss.

While for a few years, the pace of innovation seemed to be slowing down, the year 2008 may be different. Conversations with several experts on industry trends, and a deep dive into the conventional wisdom of published reports, have yielded some interesting prognostications:

• Big notebooks are getting bigger
• Notebook displays are going Hollywood
• Small notebooks will continue to shrink
• Wireless use will continue to expand
• It’s getting easier to be green
• Storage is going solid-state
• More notebooks may mean less Windows

This spurt of technological creativity may be due, at least in part, to the increasing popularity of notebooks. Experts expect that desktop PCs will still outsell laptops in 2008 — but by less than they did in 2007. Laptop sales are growing 19 percent a year, says the analyst firm Gartner, Inc., and 2010 will actually be the tipping point when notebooks finally outsell desktops. Corporations and emerging economies are still buying desktops, says Gartner Research vice president Leslie Fiering, a mobile computing specialist, “but for consumers we’re seeing the crossover.”

So what kind of technology shifts can you expect for next year’s notebooks?

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Migrating from Windows to Linux: the gentle guide

While we completely support Windows here at WinBeta, there are still many Windows users out there who are very interested in giving Linux a try and seeing how it stacks up against Microsoft’s products. The following guide is as good a place to start as any:

Linux has long been held in mystique as an operating system for hard-core techies or hackers. Yet, this is far from true for today’s distros. A modern version of Linux is as easy to setup and use as the Macintosh is legendary for. Here’s reasons why people stick to Windows and how those factors can be solved in what we like to call a ‘gentle’ approach to Linux.

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Migrating from Windows to Linux: the gentle guide

While we completely support Windows here at WinBeta, there are still many Windows users out there who are very interested in giving Linux a try and seeing how it stacks up against Microsoft’s products. The following guide is as good a place to start as any:

Linux has long been held in mystique as an operating system for hard-core techies or hackers. Yet, this is far from true for today’s distros. A modern version of Linux is as easy to setup and use as the Macintosh is legendary for. Here’s reasons why people stick to Windows and how those factors can be solved in what we like to call a ‘gentle’ approach to Linux.

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Blu-ray versus HD-DVD

Both Blu-ray and HD-DVD use the same kind of 405 nanometer wavelength blue-violet laser. That means both can focus more sharply than the 650 nanometer red lasers used in current DVD players, and so both can store much more information on the same surface area of a disc.

But there are important differences between them.

Blu-ray packs data into a tighter single spiral on the surface of a disc than HD-DVD. That means a single disk can carry more digital “pits” – the tiny zeroes and ones that are translated into audio and digital content when a disc is played.

That means that a Blu-ray discs can carry more information “per layer” (or, if you like, “spiral”). But it also makes the two formats incompatible.

A standard double-layer DVD has 9 gigabytes (GB) capacity. HD-DVD is capable of holding 30GB of data – or a full-length high-definition movie, plus extras – on a double-layer disc, but Blu-ray launched with 50GB capacity.

It means that the two competing systems must use a different coating on their discs – HD-DVD uses a surface layer that is 0.6mm thick. Blu-ray’s is much thinner at 0.1mm.

This is the root of what makes Blu-ray more expensive to produce – the thinner surface means standard DVD plants need to be re-tooled. A special hard coating must also be added to protect the information stored on a disc’s surface.

Blu-ray is the more sophisticated format – and is being hailed as a “leapfrog” technology. That advance comes at a price, however.

The theory is borne out by a (very) quick search on the internet to compare prices of HD DVD players and their Blu-ray peers.

The cheapest Blu-ray player weighs in at about £450 (£399 if you count Sony’s PlayStation 3 console, which comes with Blu-ray on board). The cheapest HD-DVD player costs about £220 (or £110, if you count the add-on HD-DVD player for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 games console – though to use it, you must already have bought an Xbox 360, which now retails from about £180).

If you are willing to take the plunge and invest in a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player despite the current uncertainty over which will last the course, remember that though both will work with most new TVs, you will need a high definition TV with 1080 screen resolution to get the most from your player.

Most HD-DVD and Blu-ray players will play standard DVDs.

More Than a Browser: 19 Alternative Ways to Use Firefox

Browsing? That’s so 90s. With the myriad of available Firefox plugins, you can do pretty much anything with your favorite browser, and many of these don’t have anything to do with browsing the web. From managing your groceries with Firefox to playing classic arcade games offline, we present 19 browser extensions that have nothing to do with, well, browsing.

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Blu-ray versus HD-DVD

Both Blu-ray and HD-DVD use the same kind of 405 nanometer wavelength blue-violet laser. That means both can focus more sharply than the 650 nanometer red lasers used in current DVD players, and so both can store much more information on the same surface area of a disc.

But there are important differences between them.

Blu-ray packs data into a tighter single spiral on the surface of a disc than HD-DVD. That means a single disk can carry more digital “pits” – the tiny zeroes and ones that are translated into audio and digital content when a disc is played.

That means that a Blu-ray discs can carry more information “per layer” (or, if you like, “spiral”). But it also makes the two formats incompatible.

A standard double-layer DVD has 9 gigabytes (GB) capacity. HD-DVD is capable of holding 30GB of data – or a full-length high-definition movie, plus extras – on a double-layer disc, but Blu-ray launched with 50GB capacity.

It means that the two competing systems must use a different coating on their discs – HD-DVD uses a surface layer that is 0.6mm thick. Blu-ray’s is much thinner at 0.1mm.

This is the root of what makes Blu-ray more expensive to produce – the thinner surface means standard DVD plants need to be re-tooled. A special hard coating must also be added to protect the information stored on a disc’s surface.

Blu-ray is the more sophisticated format – and is being hailed as a “leapfrog” technology. That advance comes at a price, however.

The theory is borne out by a (very) quick search on the internet to compare prices of HD DVD players and their Blu-ray peers.

The cheapest Blu-ray player weighs in at about £450 (£399 if you count Sony’s PlayStation 3 console, which comes with Blu-ray on board). The cheapest HD-DVD player costs about £220 (or £110, if you count the add-on HD-DVD player for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 games console – though to use it, you must already have bought an Xbox 360, which now retails from about £180).

If you are willing to take the plunge and invest in a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player despite the current uncertainty over which will last the course, remember that though both will work with most new TVs, you will need a high definition TV with 1080 screen resolution to get the most from your player.

Most HD-DVD and Blu-ray players will play standard DVDs.