Yes, I finally used the latest Pwnage Tool, made the custom firmware, and upgraded my iPhone’s firmware to 2.0. On the last post I made about this, I wasn’t too sure about upgrading since the lack of applications I need that are compatible with the new firmware. Well, the iPhone/iPod Touch community is apparently swift as a fox when it gets to this point, it’s only a week after I wrote the last post, and everything I mainly need is covered. Right now the only thing that I’m missing is probably the iSMS, which in functionality, works better than iPhone’s own SMS application.

So the upgrade actually went very well and smooth for my iPhone. It takes no more than 15-20 minutes for the initial custom firmware creation and restoration, and it takes another one hour or two to get all the settings back to my iPhone as I see fit, and testing the whole thing to make sure that it works as it should. Disabling the keyboard’s auto-correction was also easy enough and quite non-destructive.

One of the most interesting appeal that made me eager to do the upgrade is the now-native applications available in AppStore. And those are really really great. Most of the essential things that I need, such as Twitterrific, WordPress, NetNewsWire, Palringo, or Facebook, come as free applications. And the only thing I actually bought so far is Things, which hopefully in the future, connects and syncs with the desktop version that I use daily. I also found BookReader (in Cydia), which is a barebone version of Books.app, and completely supports HTML files that I used for the Alkitab. Although it is extremely bare bone, I think it would do justice for now, and I will have the instructions updated on that one.

So, bottom line, if there are still applications that you really do need and irreplaceable, I suggest that you keep refraining yourself from upgrading to 2.0. But as for me and a day with the iPhone 2.0, I must admit that I’m excited on what lies ahead.

I was probably overly excited this morning as my RSS news reader pointed out a new feed from the iPhone Dev Team’s blog. The next generation Pwnage Tool is out, and we can both jailbreak and unlock the first generation iPhone running on the 2.0 firmware. I then immediately download the tool and left it to church.

Earlier tonight, I decided to give a try to upgrade my iPhone to 2.0. After downloading all the necessary firmware and bootloader files, there’s a catch. First of all, Installer support is not there yet, so we can only install apps outside Apple’s AppStore from the Cydia Installer. It’s basically the same thing, but there’s a second catch: Not all of the third party apps work with the new 2.0 firmware. While we could probably live off for the next few weeks with the barebone 2.0 firmware and several apps from the AppStore, one thing I probably can’t live without is the keyboard tweak that disables the annoying auto-correct feature. Apparently, the old patch does not work with 2.0. Oh well, that means, a few weeks of wait is probably worth it, at least until all of the old apps are updated for 2.0, and until most of the bugs are ironed out.

I finally got my Alkitab hosted graciously at modmyifone. So if any of you want to install it to your iPhone or iPod Touch, things have just got much more easier. Just open up Installer, install Books.app, and then install the Alkitab.

It’s been three weeks since Yero came home and brought my iPhone order along with him, so I figured that it might be good to do a simple review of the device. Unlike people who bought this thing only to show that “they have the latest gadgets” or to show that “they’re (so-they-say) cool”, I bought it for the simplicity of use, because it is an Apple device, and that it syncs perfectly with my Mac (unlike some other crappy mobile devices with a stupid mobile OS, a device that some think could beat the iPhone hands down, or the other one that’s used to be smart, until they split the company, merge it, split it, merge it, and split it again, and decided to use that stupid mobile OS in the end. And did they merge it back again? I lost track).

My first experience with PDAs or Smartphones went back several years ago when my Dad bought himself a HP iPag 1910. I think I remember that he complained about how it hangs almost all the time, almost everyday. That is until he migrated to the Palm Treo 650, which I consider as a good smartphone of its time.

My first actual PDA is the Palm Zire 72, which blue paint scraps off by itself, and it’s a good jack-of-all-trades device, provided that you sync with Windows. At that point in my life, I don’t really care about calendar and address book workflow simplicity.

When I moved over to the Mac, the Palm was “technically” dead. It doesn’t sync to Mac’s Address Book and Calendar. And in fact, Mac OS X’s version of Palm Desktop sucked right down to the bone.

Compared to the previous experiences I had with PDAs, at the time Apple announced that they’re launching iPhone, I figured that this is it. This is the device I’ve been looking for. And today, I have no regrets for shelling out $400. The iPhone is worth every penny.

Hardware-wise, almost everything is spectacular. The screen is large, bright, and astonishing. The touchscreen response is second to none. And yes, hang with an iPhone for a day or two, and go on try that HTC Touch. It’s like comparing Rolls Royce with Becak, but here, the Becak costs more than a Rolls. Heck, the Touch is not even friggin’ responsive, and I don’t know how they can name it “Touch”. I think it should be named “Smack”.

The QWERTY keyboard, in contrary to what others believed, is highly responsive. Even without tactile feedback, I seldom get typos. I can tell you that being not able to text message while driving is not a drawback. That is called SAFETY.

Mobile Safari is probably the best browser on a mobile device ever created, despite the lack of Adobe Flash in it. It provides you the closest, if not the same, browsing experience to a real deal browser. By real deal, I mean any browser but Internet Explorer, whatever version that is.

For a device this big and powerful, I’d say the battery life is fair. Mine’s probably a bit more of a resource-hog as I need the bluetooth to be on every time, just for the simplicity that I don’t have to turn it on when using a headset while driving. But other than that, provided that you turn off the Wi-Fi when it’s not used, it’s perfectly fine, and on my average use, it can stay for two days without recharging.

Syncing contacts and calendar with my Mac is just brilliant. Enough said. No more of those dark hours trying to sync Address Book to Palm Desktop to PDA. It syncs perfectly, and as snappy as you can get. On a Mac, of course.

Being fair, of course, nothing’s perfect, and the iPhone also suffers from that as well. I’ve compiled a list that I think Apple should’ve include in the iPhone by default:

• The ability to install 3rd party softwares (done with Jailbreak, and almost done with Apple’s new SDK).
• The ability to turn off the keyboard’s auto-correct feature (Oh yes, it’s annoying).
• File transfer over Bluetooth.
• Sending and receiving business cards are still a messy messy job.
• Sync over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
• Adobe Flash (I’m a web-designer, at some point I might think that having Flash on mobile Safari could be useful).
• A better camera with flash (Not that I need it the most, but I think we can appreciate a better one).

So, it ain’t that bad for a phone that Steve Ballmer (The Monkey Boy) considered as a joke. I consider him as a joke, actually. It’s not everyday you can get a company to hire a dancing primate as their CEO.

I survived three weeks with iPhone, and I grow on loving it, where I didn’t even survive half an hour with Christo’s HTC Touch. Bottom line, iPhone rocks!

I just finished a personal project which I decided to do in my free time during the holidays. Think of it as my dedication to pro-bono church works. My personal project is the Indonesian version of the Bible. Why? Because I found no Indonesian iPhone/iPod Touch versions of it over the internet, so I decided to make it on my own.

I’ve been using electronic Bibles to reduce my load when going to the church since I used my old Palm Zire 72, and when I moved to the Sony Ericsson K610i afterwards. After I bought the iPod Touch two weeks ago, and got it jailbroken, I figured that with its superb text-rendering capabilities which is far better from my previous gadgets (Thanks to OS X), it can be a good eBook reader with a nice legibility. So why not have a Bible in it?

I’ve set up a dedicated page for it here (which became a reason that I have to spend more time taking care of my personal site) with all of the needed instructions provided. So if you’re an Indonesian, and happened to own an iPhone or an iPod Touch, and needed the bible, feel free to download a copy.

It seems that Erica Sadun of TUAW posted the whole reason for me not to upgrade to Leopard… Yet. I simply can’t risk my productivity over an OS upgrade. Well, patience is a virtue.

I heard that the IMAP feature on Gmail doesn’t come to all its users. Well, in that case, I can consider myself lucky since the IMAP feature on my Gmail account is active. But of course, sometimes luck comes with a catch. In my case, it’s the speed.

Actually, with my current line of work, I’m not a too mobile person. 75% of our clients are abroad, so we basically communicate with them using emails or instant messengers. In another word, we are required to be stationery on our workstations with a good internet connection and that’s it. But even though I’m not that mobile, I could appreciate if, let’s say, I have to check my emails on the road using my iBook, or the iPhone (should I got it by the time it gets here), the mailbox syncs automatically with all of my machines at work, at home, and on the road.

With that thought as my main expected holy grail, I enabled the IMAP feature on my Gmail yesterday, and hoped that I will have a perfectly synced email wherever I am. And yes, the truth hurts, eventhough that we now have a 768k connection, it doesn’t seem to be fast enough to manage the IMAP connection from Gmail. What I get? A constant wait when moving from one mailbox to another, another constant wait when syncing the email info everytime I read a mail, or flag it, or whatever.

As much as I wanted an IMAP feature to simplify my email chores, now I simply have to go back using the good old POP because of the time constraints. What can you say? Indonesia is probably in its baby steps toward the broadband era, but it does still sucks.

I spent this morning, 12AM in the morning to be exact, watching live coverages of the latest WWDC with friends from Godote. I’ve seen the soon-to-be upgrades and features of Leopard on last year’s WWDC keynote, but I must say that they’ve made it even better. If we’re talking about Vista killer, this is the real deal. Never before, an OS X has been this functional, user friendly, fast, intuitive and beautiful at the same time. I am so buying Leopard when it arrives on Apple’s shelves.

I tried to upgrade my blog engine to Movable Type 3.2, but instead of having a smooth clean upgrade, I encountered multiple errors such as missing files, illegal access to the SQL databases, and so on. This might be a result of a different configuration method used by the new MT engine, which I haven’t quite figure out. I wish everything was as simple as software upgrades in a Mac. Oh well, I might as well stick to the 3.17 for the time being…

Finally I decided to fiddle around with the color settings on my Mac, and for the very first time, I bumped into the closest color setting ever in years. Well, it’s still not that exactly accurate, but I think this would do fine until I can get a professional service working on the calibrations. I am currently using the Colormatch RGB setting, and it’s rather surprising when you can get a close match using a preset option.