iPhone finds: jailbroken

I’ve got the jailbroken apps that everyone seems to have (PDANet, Winterboard, Cycorder…), but I’ve just found two others that rock my world.

First is iPhone Notes. It’s actually a Mac app; you don’t download anything to your iPhone unless you don’t already have OpenSSH (IOW, to get this app to work, jailbreak your iPhone and download OpenSSH from Cydia. THEN get iPhone Notes for your Mac). Fire up the app on your Mac, click the Save/Load button, log in to your phone, and either move your desktop notes to the iPhone or vice versa. No, no syncing. It’s overwrite one way or the other. If you change a note on the Mac and hit cmd-S, it overwrites the phone posthaste. Here is a shot of the Mac app:

As readers know, I’ve been on a mission to find a simple lists/to-do app that avoids the need for Web syncing and slow starts, and this may well do it. It’s the closest thing to using paper, which would be the method of choice if I could manage to avoid losing the paper, but I can’t, so perhaps this will do the trick. It transfers very quickly over a WiFi connection. Sync would be nice, but NOTHING out there seems to truly sync without causing major problems right now, so I’m not that upset about it. It’s donationware (yes, I donated!).

Aside: WHY can Apple not manage to do this natively? Palm had synced notes and tasks like 15 years ago!

All right. Second is biteSMS, available through Cydia, which I never tried before because I thought it was an SMS workaround that you had to buy SMS credits for. Well, it’s that too, but you can also just replace the built-in SMS app and send/receive SMS messages through your carrier (AT&T for us US folks). It’s so killer cool because you can compose SMS messages in landscape mode (without changing to another app):

Switch back to upright mode and other cool options become available. Swipe over the compose box and get the options to insert contact information or your current location:

Perhaps most titillating, you can swipe across a message and get the option to forward (yay! forward!) or delete the single message:

The biteSMS app is just flat-out free. Credit costs depend on the country/countries in question.

T-Mobile G1 is jailbroken

Well, it didn’t take too long. G1 is jailbroken. Full system access, read and write, has been obtained. And this method is quite easy. A few folks at the xda-developers forum discovered you can start telnet on the device by downloading PTerminal from Android Market, and then you can telnet to the device from your computer.

Once you’ve done that – you’re logged in as root. One simple command mounts the system dir as writable, and away we go.

Here’s the basic process:

1. Turn on WiFi in the G1 (Settings > Wireless Controls > Wi-Fi). Make sure you’re connected to a network.
2. Start up PTerminal (search in the Market) and you’ll get a prompt once its launched.
3. Enter cd system and hit Enter.
4. Enter cd bin and hit Enter.
5. Enter telnetd and hit Enter. You’ve now started telnet on your G1.
6. Enter netstat and hit Enter. You’ll now see your G1’s IP address. You can also find this in the Settings > Wireless Controls > Wi-Fi > and click on your network you’re connected to. It will show you your IP.
7. Start up Terminal on your OS X machine, or bring up a command prompt on your Windows box. Type telnet [your.ip.address.we.just.found] and hit Enter/Return. So, if your IP was 192.168.1.101, you’d type telnet 192.168.1.101 and hit Enter/Return.
8. You are logged in as root now. To remount the system file as read write, type mount -oremount,rw /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system from the Terminal/Command Prompt and hit Enter/Return.

This opens a whole world of possibilities.

I’ve put up a fledgling Android file directory and list here. Its not quite complete, and there’s some symlinks in there I didn’t properly label yet, but its a solid start.

Remember, this is the first baby steps to jailbreaking the G1. When the iPhone was initially jailbroken, everything was incredibly dull and tedious to do – all via command line, etc. Heck, when iPhuc came out it was a huge breakthrough, and there was still nothing close to a GUI app. Look for huge steps to be taken soon in making this easier for the average Joe Six Pack.

Four Jailbroken Software for iPhone: ColloQ, Mobile Twitter, SkySMS, NES emulator

1. ColloQ
ColloQ is a small iphone software IRC client for jailbroken iphones, so you can now join one of the oldest internet chat clients with one of the newest trendy phones…

Download This Software Here

 

2. Mobile Twitter

Mobile Twitter for jailbroken iphones is iphone software which does not only give you the possibility to communicate with friends, it also gives you the possibility to post your timeline for all your friends, so they will always see when you will be available for a chat or at which bar they will be able to find you…

Download This Software Here

 

3. SkySMS

SkySMS allows you to send SMS messages over the internet using you iphone. You can find all current available providers where this software works with through this link: http://www.xwaves.net/?inc=viewproject&id=9&page=projets/skysms3mobile/providers.html

Download This Software Here

 

4. iPhone NES emulator

This software for jailbroken iphones is a native NES emulator for the iPhone, currently using the InfoNES core.

Download This Software Here