Posts Tagged ‘ iphone ’

Why I got an Iphone

In short: network towers.

My old phone, a HTC Wildfire was designed for Telstra’s next-G network. This means that the radio towers it picks up are unique to telstra (HSDPA 850/2100). I found this out the hard way when I tried moving to another Australian network and could hardly get reception in the middle of the city.

There are multiple frequencies of 3g radio towers (Four I think, maybe five) and most phones are only designed to pick up a select few (The ones that the network provider uses). However if I am planning on travelling and want to use the local networks I need to have a phone that can pick up as many providers as possible.

The popular phones (Iphones, also the samsung galaxy S) are designed to be homogenous, while the less popular phones try to save costs by making the same phone in different versions (Each version picks up different networks eg the HTC Wildfire A3335 vs the HTC Wildfire A3333). So the popular phones can pick up a greater range of radio frequencies.

Which means I can change between networks easily with an Iphone, while my oldphone was essentially useless on anything but telstra.

Painful thing about computing

So I recently got an iphone, I am not a big apple fan and actually prefer android in every way, however for many reasons I bought an old 3g off one of my mates.

The first noticeable thing was how slow it ran. But this isn’t a post to bitch about apple things.

I did manage to fix the slowness, it was because the old phone was trying to run new firmware which was too complex for it to handle. The solution was to downgrade the phone to IOS 3.1.3.

Anyway so I had this phone, downgraded and fast. But I needed my phone to be able to tether its internet, something that the old operating system didn’t do. To do this I needed to Jailbreak it and get one of the wi-fi hotspot apps.

So I set out to jailbreak this phone, in the process I had to do what is known as shaving the yak. I use Linux, which 90% of the jailbreak tools don’t like. I tried emulating windows, which itunes doesn’t like. My parents internet kept messing around with me, etc, etc.

Everything kept going wrong.

Normally when trying to solve a computer problem (Or any problem) it takes a few attempts. This is fine, you try a different angles until something works.

However to jailbreak this phone I literally had to try dozens of different tools and methods because nothing would work.

Then finally, after hours of pain I find a tool that recognised the phone easily (Which was in itself an achievement), and had a single button “Jailbreak”. 3 seconds after clicking this it pops up a message “Jailbreak successful”.

After so much pain, the problem was solved in 3 seconds.

This is why computing problems suck.

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