Yes, I have an iPhone. It’s not the newer 3G version, and unless I’m willing to start paying a whole lot extra, I probably never will. About a year or so ago right after they did the big $100 price drop, I picked up two refurbished 8gb iPhone’s for my wife and I. Once I got them in, I unlocked and jailbroke them, and had them running on T-Mobile in just a short while. I haven’t been disappointed at all (save for a lack of MMS messages, which I don’t do much of). Only real adjustment at that time was not being able to carry around 20gb of music with me. I’m pretty used to it now, since I sync up every day just to get new podcasts I listen to and charge the phone up.
The latest update for the iPhone is 2.0, which adds some cool functions, but mainly it lets you have access to the App Store, which is Apple’s version of a free/shareware/pay version of Installer/AppTap. But in doing so, the old apps that I ran with 1.1.4 are no longer compatible with the new update. For now thats fine, I can do without SwirlyMMS till it gets updated, and Installer/AppTap is almost ready to go. They do have a similar application that you can get known as Cydia, but it has some issues that I will go into later.
So last week I made the plunge and upgraded to 2.0 using Pwnage Tool with the default settings. It worked great, and I installed the T-Zone mod so that I can get $5.99 internet from T-Mobile, along with a few other mods (BigBoss ones mainly). But after about a day of usage, I noticed it was really, really slow and laggy. Switching into the settings menu, or simply trying to type text messages to my wife it would lag. A few times it would just reboot on its own. I thought for a minute I might have but some version of Windows ME on my phone. I dug around in the forums, both on the official forums and the “unofficial” ones, and found I was not alone. Numerous people were complaining, even those who had the new 3G phone running without any jailbreaks/unlocks. But a 2.0.1 fix is in the works, so perhaps in a few weeks Apple will fix their buggy 2.0 release that the rumor mill says is bugged due to Apple secrecy preventing any good beta testing.
So I gathered all my tools together about Wednesday and rolled it back to 1.1.4, which was easier than it sounds. I had some issues with trying to get it to work right on my Windows Vista and XP boxes, but it worked without a hitch doing it through my Macbook. I really feel for those folks who don’t have access to multiple machines, because I’ve had this happen before in the past, and sometimes you needed to hook it to a Macbook to get it back running again.
After running the rest of the week on 1.1.4, and doing some forum searching again, I not only missed some of the apps from Apple’s App Store, but some user got great results from not installing the Cydia installer, and rolling their own custom install file (IPSW). I thought to myself that I could do that, and if it still was bad, I could always go back again to 1.1.4. So Friday I took the leap again, made my own IPSW file with just the T-Zone mod installed, and let it rip. Lo and behold, it worked great! I haven’t experienced any of the slowdown at all (to test it I put my clean phone against my wife’s with Cydia installed and compared). I believe this is from Cydia installing custom/updated versions of some operating system files, which in technical terms may be “better”, but unfortunatley Apple may have jury-rigged them to cause issues when they interact with one another.
So now I am up and running on 2.0 with just the T-Zone mod, sitting in my office this morning sipping on coffee, with my iPhone blaring the Hair Metal station from AOL Radio coming over the T-Mobile EDGE network. The iPhone isn’t everything, but what it does actually do, it does pretty well – and running on T-Mobile, I sure save a ton versus being on AT&T.
