IPhone 3G S Teardown

iphone

Already, both Rapid repair and ifixit have torn down the new iPhone 3G S, and phonewreck has provided some analysis. The new CPU runs twice as fast at 600 MHz and supports 720p video. They also found that the new 3 megapixel camera took better photos. Surprisingly, despite apple’s claims that the new phone has significantly better battery life, the battery itself has only 6% more capacity. Overall, not much has changed.

[Related iPhone 3G under the hood]

IPhone PwnageTool Released

The iPhone dev-team has released an updated version of PwnageTool. It supports jailbreaking iPhones using the 3.0 firmware. This update does not include the much easier to use QuickPwn, but it should be coming soon. The release also doesn’t include the UltraSn0w unlock which will be coming via Cydia.

[photo: edans]

IPhone 3.0 Tethering Is Easy

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]

PhonePoint Pen

[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.

Palm Pre Teardown

palm pre teardown

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

Palm Pre IPod Spoofing Confirmed

palmpre

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.