iPhone dev team is at it again. They claim to have finally hacked the iPhone 3G. Originally codenamed “yellowsn0w”, it is targeted to be released on December 31st. This should free you from your locked in carrier as long as you have version 2.11.07 or earlier.
[via Engadget]
Google has new program to sell Android phones directly to developers. The Android Dev Phone 1 is both SIM-unlocked and hardware-unlocked. SIM-unlocked means you can use it on any GSM carrier you want. Hardware-unlocked means you can run any system you want on the phone, not just officially signed ones. No more need to worry about security patches taking away your root access.
The device is $399. You will need to purchase it through the Android Market as a registered developer (a $25 fee). We wonder how long before the unsigned bootloader starts getting flashed to T-Mobile phones.
Two new Android phones have surfaced recently which may prove just as friendly: the Kogan Agora Pro and the QiGi i6.
UPDATE: While shipping is free in US, it is incredibly expensive everywhere else. Yes, we bought one.
[via Techmeme]
[photo: tnkgrl]
If you can get through the cell phone text speak, you’ll probably enjoy this cool tutorial on how to build a cell phone controlled robot. This bot decodes the key tones, similar to the automated phone systems we’ve all experienced. It uses a chip called a MT8870 DTMF decoder to translate the signal for the Atmega 16 controller. The circuit diagram is pretty hard to read, maybe we missed a downloadable one somewhere. The source code is available.
It would be nice to get some feedback from the robot, so you aren’t driving it completely blind. This is similar to the Lego cell phone rover that we showed you before. Next, he should make it recognize voice commands.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L3hdPxMa_o]
[Stephen Myers] has been toying around with some beta ioBridge hardware. He decided to build a remote control dog treat dispenser. ioBridge‘s hardware is built specifically to make web enabling projects easy. The main controller board has four I/O channels that speak to addon modules. It has an ethernet port on the main board and an easy to configure website.
[Stephen] used a servo addon board for his project. The dispenser is built from a scrap CD spindle attached to a servo. He can issue commands from his iPhone, which shows live video of the kennel. He’ll be building several other automation projects based on this system.
[via TUAW]
[vimeo 2310654]
Like everybody, we sometimes get a little frustrated with our cellphones. Probably one of the most annoying things is when we drop our phones once and they stop working. At Nokia’s hardware damage labs in San Diego, they physically test their phones for extreme uses. They test things like flip tension, water resistance, and even UV resistance. Recently, the folks over at MobileCrunch were given a tour of these labs and were nice enough to post an in-depth article about what they saw. In addition to the impact testing video above, there are many more videos posted that demonstrate the tests they perform.
[vimeo 2373142]
Embedded above is a demo video of an iPhone running a Linux 2.6 kernel. The iphone-dev team has created a new bootloader called OpeniBoot. The bootloader lets you boot into a Linux console, which you can talk to over a USB serial device. They’ve got busybox working, but there is no touchscreen support yet. The instructions are not that difficult and include how to back up your settings. It works on first and second gen iPhones and first gen iPod Touch. This is a very early port, but the future is wide open… Android iPhone?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXCA8SM9nS4]
While the iPhone 3G included several new features that its predecessor lacked, one thing it did not include was a dock. Instead of shelling out $30 to buy Apple’s iPhone 3G dock, [Roland] and the folks at Geeky-Gadgets.com decided to design their own cardboard iPhone dock. While this doesn’t include any fancy features like dock connectors or audio line-outs, it looks like a quick and budget friendly way to give your iPhone 3G a place to charge and sync.
