Did you upgrade your iPhone to 3.0 yet? 9 to 5 Mac has posted a very good reason to upgrade: enabling tethering is almost stupidly simple. Just run a simple command and then go through a restore procedure. All thats left is to sit back and enjoy your other new features you could find on a four year old Nokia.
[Related: ultrasn0w announced]
[via @waxpancake]
There aren’t many details, or really any at all here. This was just too fun not to post. Here are two cans strung together, just like when you were a kid. However, when you talk into one the sound is then converted and transmitted to the other via fiber optic cable. Looking at the pictures, it seems that it is only one way though.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvu2hwMFkMs&feature=player_embedded]
Some grad students at Duke University have been working on a new tool for cell phones equipped with accellerometers. The software called Phonepoint Pen, allows you to write with your phone in the air. Though we don’t find the applications they mention very practical, we could see this being very nice for application navigation. If you could program a 3 dimentional gesture to load certain apps, that would be nice.
The newly released Palm Pre has been torn down by both Rapid Repair and iFixit. They note the easy to use interface, but the slide out keyboard makes for weird transitions. There’s nothing surprising on the hardware side except capacitive screen and LCD come as a single unit and would have to be replaced together if either fails.
UPDATE: phoneWreck’s analysis
The new Palm Pre cellphone has a “media sync” feature which lets the device sync with iTunes in a fashion identical to an iPod. Last week [Jon Lech Johansen] speculated that this was not done in cooperation with Apple and that Palm was spoofing the iPod’s USB controller. This was confirmed today when a tipster sent him a screenshot of what the device reports in both standard and media sync modes. The Palm Pre reports its Product ID as iPod and Vendor ID as Apple with a few other changes. [Jon] notes that it doesn’t change the root USB node, so Apple should be able to block this behavior with an iTunes update. With Palm already pulling tricks like this presumably through software we wonder if this will become a full-on arms race.
It’s been many months since the T-Mobile G1 was initially rooted. In that time, the process has been streamlined and tools have been built to make it much easier. Having a rooted phone has become even more desirable with the recent release of the 1.5 firmware that includes an onscreen keyboard along with other improvements. Having a rooted phone means you can do tricks like setting up a 3G/WiFi bridge. [Taylor Wimberly] has written a guide to help you easily root your G1 without having to go digging through forums for software bits. The process starts by using [Mike Moussa]’s rooting app to revert the phone to the RC29 build. You then use the “Android stupidly executes everything you type” exploit to launch telnetd and upgrade the bootloader. After that, the upgrade process is fairly easy. You just flash a new baseband and build. Once you’ve got your new custom firmware, you can do future updates using an app from the Android Market. We recently updated our Android Dev Phone 1 to 1.5 and haven’t had any issues.
[photo: tnkgrl]
Sometimes you find yourself thinking “this cell phone is far to compact and unobtrusive.” [Trotmaster] had this thought and did something about it. Ok, well actually he’s trying to have some fun and build a glove phone, inspector gadget style. There really doesn’t seem to be a good reason to do this other than it would be cool, so we’ll proceed on those grounds. He has disassembled the phone and extended all the buttons. When wearing the glove, you can dial by pressing the finger tip buttons with your thumb. The screen is located on the back of the hand and can be lifted and rotated for easy viewing. Can anyone think of an application where this would be a beneficial layout, assuming you refined it a bit?
[via instructables]
