LinOSX TechnoMash

A great post from Nik Cubrilovic on those of us forgetting about our FOSS ideals by falling victim to the consumerist attitudes that the shiniest, sexiest gadgets in the playground evoke.

TechCrunchIT » Blog Archive » The New Apple Walled Garden

The Apple Store India was relaunched some time back but fairly recently, possibly even today, Apple has dropped the prices on almost all products in India. The top of the line iMac offered by Apple in India (not the new 3.06 GHz one but the older 2.8GHz 24″) has been reduced from Rs. 96,600 to Rs. 83,500 and the MacBook Air (1.6GHz with PATA drive) has gone from Rs. 96,600 to Rs. 87,900. Those are some pretty substantial drops. Now if only Apple could release their most current products in India like the rest of the world.

According to Ars Technica, Vodafone will be launching the iPhone in India beating out Airtel. It’s not a surprise considering Vodafone already has deals with Apple in Europe. What remains to be seen is when will the iPhone be released, how much the iPhone will cost and whether it will be the rumored 3G iPhone.

There was a huge backlash against Mercedes Benz in the late 90’s for introducing old model E class cars in India as compared to the rest of the world. It took Mercedes some time but they realized that Indians want the latest of whatever the rest of the world is getting. That was a dozen years ago. With the amount of wealth recently created in India, a 3G Apple iPhone introduction in India will go a long way to placate people’s egos, knowing they have the latest and greatest.

As most people expected, Apple rolled out their iMac upgrades. Most of us didn’t expect the upgrades this early and some of us, took a gamble that Apple wouldn’t be coming out with updates till the late summer but nonetheless, these iMacs are the brawniest iMacs yet. All models have processors starting at 2.4GHz on the 20″ and going up to 3.06GHz on the 24″ iMac. The iMacs have been upgraded with a minimum 2GB of RAM, and a 1066GHz front-side bus as well as a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS with 512MB memory. This is why you should avoid instant gratification and Apple loves impulse buyers like me.

Well, I’ve been trying for almost a whole week to get Airtel’s Unlimited GPRS service (or Mobile Office as it’s called on their site) setup. Unfortunately, all the SMS confirmation messages telling me that it is setup and will cost Rs. 499/month for unlimited usage were all bogus.

I’ve confirmed that even though my iPhone shows the “E” implying an EDGE/GPRS connection, the service isn’t really activated. I’ve used the new Airtel SIM card in my Apple iPhone (which is unsupported by Airtel) and also a Nokia E61 (which is supported). It doesn’t work on either phone. I then even tried to put the SIM into a USB EDGE/GPRS device and configure it on my Mac Mini but still no luck.

I believe Airtel’s setup process for GPRS is a manual one. That’s one of the reasons it will take 4 hours to setup the service. 4 Hours have turned into almost 144 hours and countless phone calls to both 121 (customer service) and 12118 (technical support). 12118 tells me that it’s not active and 121 sometimes tells me that it is active, other times they tell me they’ve put in a request to have it activated, and other times they’ve told me that it is active. The support on Airtel’s mobile desk is fairly horrendous as compared to their excellent service for their DSL and landline products.

In New Delhi, at least, you must send the following SMS to 121 from your Airtel phone:

STARTGPRS

I’ve heard that “AGPRS” also works but in my case, neither SMS messages nor telephone calls have actually gotten the service activated.

Once you receive a confirmation message, you can go into your settings and setup the APN as shown below:

Though, the confirmation messages haven’t helped me, it doesn’t have anything to do with the iPhone. It only has to do with Airtel’s inability to get the service fully activated. The process appears to be a two-part manual process and one service rep let it slip that only the first part has been done, hence, I’m getting the “E” on my iPhone but no actual service.

My only advice is to keep hounding them to get the service activated and, if possible, use an Airtel supported handset while asking them to activate the service. If you tell them you’re using an iPhone, their eyes will glaze over and you’ll get the ole heev-ho.

I’ll post updates as they become available.

Update: 29th April, 2008
Airtel was able to finally get it right. It took them 9 days and countless phone calls plus SMSes and a little bit of strong-arming to get them to put me on the phone with a floor supervisor but the supervisor finally got GPRS (Mobile Office) setup on my account. The access point name (APN) on my iPhone is set to airtelgprs.com. All I had to do was turn the iPhone off and back on to get it to work once the service was activated. I just hope some bonehead over there doesn’t turn the service off again …

Update: 5th May, 2008
Airtel has done it again and “automatically” disconnected my Mobile Office GPRS connection. They couldn’t give me any explanation except “the status is wrong”. Even after pressing the supervisor for an explanation, I got nothing. They’re telling me they will resolve the problem in 24 hours, an unacceptable amount of time for “automatically” disabling my service without any notice. As happy as I’ve been with Airtel’s DSL service, I am immensely disappointed with their mobile service. The incompetence continues ….

Update 2: 5th May, 2008
It took Airtel a little over 6 hours but Mobile Office GPRS is working again….for now.

Well, as expected, Steve Jobs & Co., released the much anticipated iPhone SDK. You should be able to download the iPhone SDK in a few hours. It appears, Apple didn’t put enough horsepower behind the servers hosting the iPhone SDK so the site is unavailable.

Highlights:

• The iPhone SDK is Free to download
• Intel based Mac required to run the SDK (Gotta figure out what to do with the PowerPC MacMini – perhaps an Ubuntu server?)
• Costs $99 to join the Developer Program where Apple will give the developer a digital certificate and provide hosting for the app, and testing facilities
• 70% of the proceeds of any app sold will go to the developer, 30% going to Apple to cover costs associated with credit card processing, hosting, etc.
• A separate iPhone Enterprise Beta Program has been started
• Kleiner Perkins has setup an iFund with $100 million to fund entrepreneurs developing groundbreaking applications on the Apple iPhone

From what I’ve seen online, the SDK looks to be very easy to use and very full featured. Not knowing how to program in Objective-C might be a problem but as soon as I can download a copy, we’ll see what can be done by a noob.

Apple has released the 1.1.4 firmware for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Apparently, 1.1.4 can be jailbroken using Zibri’s jailbreak tool. However, he is suggesting people wait until it is thoroughly tested for 1.1.4. There is currently no unlock for the 1.1.4 available but I would say, skip 1.1.4 as it appears to be a minor bug fix release, at this time anyway.

Just last week, George Hotz or “geohot” as he is known did some amazing work on unlocking the iPhone for OTB 1.1.2 and 1.1.3 iPhones as well as unlocking upgraded iPhones. Since I’m using my iPhone on Vodafone in India, I didn’t want to upgrade from 1.1.1 to 1.1.2 as the unlock for 1.1.2 wasn’t an “official” dev release. But now, as the developer community has managed to unlock the iPhone under 1.1.3, it seemed like the right time to upgrade – though with a little bit of pain.

There are plenty of sites that explain how to upgrade a 1.0.2 or 1.1.1 iPhone to 1.1.3 and unlock it. I won’t go into writing a full post on how to do it. What I will do, however, is explain some of the “gotchas” during the upgrade process. Your mileage may vary depending on the method you use to upgrade. I primarily used the instructions at How to jailbreak 1.1.2 or 1.1.3.

I started with an unlocked 1.1.1 iPhone that was upgraded from a 1.0.2 iPhone. I had revirginzed the 1.0.2 phone and upgraded to 1.1.1 and unlocked using anySIM 1.1.1.

The first thing I did was to sync my iPhone to my MacMini and then do a complete restore my 1.1.1 iPhone to 1.1.1, thus wiping out all the garbage that I had accumulated in the last few months. Now, once the phone was restored, the unlock was still active but I had to jailbreak the phone as described in the instructions above.

After jailbreaking the iPhone, I installed the OktoPrep package from Installer.app. I then started downloading the 1.1.2 jailbreaking archive. Now it is critical that you do an UPGRADE from iTunes to 1.1.2 as described on Unlock.no. If you do a restore by mistake, you will have to restore back to 1.1.1, jailbreak it, install OktoPrep again, then, finally, UPGRADE to 1.1.2. Following the directions, made it very easy to jailbreak and use my 1.1.2 iPhone. I unlocked it using anySim 1.1.2u and the installed iWorld from the “Tweaks 1.1.2″ section of Installer.app.

Now, upgrading to 1.1.3 using the instructions at Unlock.no were great, BUT, I found that doing a Restore didn’t allow my iPhone to reboot no matter what I tried. Hence, make sure when you’re running the “Official 1.1.3 Upgrader” that you tap “Upgrade” and not “Restore”. If you follow those directions an repeatedly “Update” from 1.1.1 to 1.1.2 and then 1.1.2 to 1.1.3, you should be able to start your iPhone running 1.1.3 already unlocked.

Since upgrading to 1.1.3, an easier 1.1.3 unlock has also been made available but I have not tried it.

iPhone Software Unlocking of firmware 1.1.2 and 1.1.3 is possible for upgraded phones and out of the box phones. I will post more details as they become clear.

It took some time to get the correct MMS settings for the iPhone but below is a screenshot of the exact settings to be used with Vodafone in Delhi when using SwirlyMMS for the iPhone. The same settings should work with Vodafone users in the rest of India and I would love to hear from those of you who have gotten it working. Unfortunately, SwirlyMMS doesn’t yet allow receiving MMS messages but the developers are working on adding that feature in soon.