Pete's Eats

I had a 1st gen iPhone that I bought from the US long before they were out here in the UK and of course I had to jailbreak it and unlock it to actually use it. I despised having to do that but Apple had decided that the UK wasn’t going to get the iPhone at launch and that was that. I put it down to supply in that there probably just weren’t enough iPhones to go around.

A little later, I bought a 16gb 1st gen iPhone on O2 when they finally launched it over here and signed for a new 18 month contract; at least I had an ‘offical’ iPhone now and could make day0 use of the software updates that seemed to be coming in thick and fast at that time. A few months later, they launched the 3g iPhone at the same time as in the UK and although I was in Japan at the time and couldn’t get one of the first batch I upgraded pretty soon after thanks to O2 offering a free upgrade if I extended my contract with them.

The app store has been a revalation and kept me pretty interested and excited about the phone since then. I’ve even dipped my toe into iPhone programming during this time. The pace of innovation seems to be slowing though and I’ve been secretly very jealous of most of my friends with their jailbroken (and mostly unlocked) iPhones at being able to do so much more with them by using unofficial apps that seem to make much more of the platform. So, anyway, I jailbroke my iPhone today because I’ve been waiting for Apple to approve the release of Qik for ages and there seems to be no word on it yet. I don’t know if the hold up is with Apple or Qik or the operators but I’ve really wanted to use the app for some time now and at last I can…

I hated having to do this though and it very sharply throws into contrast the problem with using and supporting closed platforms like iPhone. I’ve been reading Jonathan’s ‘The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It’ over the past few weeks and it’s really shifted my thinking to a new level about this kind of thing. I’ll try and find the time to make a proper post about closed platforms etc because I realize that it’s a bigger, more important issue than I’d thought before.

For reference: it’s not easy jailbreaking a 3g iPhone and certainly not one that’s fully up to date with the released firmware updates installed via iTunes so I used ‘Pusher‘ to put installer on my iPhone without jailbreaking in the end. You don’t get Cydia, just installer, but that was enough to get Qik for now… With all of these things though, try it at your own risk as there seems to be plenty of horror stories out there despite it going perfectly for me.

Knowing my luck, Apple will release a huge update to the firmware tomorrow or something and I’ll have to lose the installer app and Qik again!

Me on Qik