Back in February at MWC in Barcelona we met up with Powermat to see their range of solutions for wireless charging of all sorts of devices (iPhones, Blackberrys, Nintendo DS and iPods, among others). Perhaps most importantly, we have since got hold of some review samples of the Powermat, iPhone case, iPod dock and PowerCube. I’ve been using the whole lot for the last few weeks and can now share with the world the joys (and few low points) of the Powermat system. Continue reading »

Released shortly after the surge of zombie-based games that plagued the AppStore around Halloween, Westbright’s ‘Zombies’ breathes a breath of fresh air and comedy into a somewhat stale genre.

Zombies is a turn-based game where your aim is to, rather unsurprisingly, kill the zombies. This is not, however, the usual gore-laden shooter commonly associated with zombie games but, rather, an amusing little gem that is so addictive in it’s simplicity. How many other zombie-based games have the lead character saying in their best British accent ‘oh dear’ when devoured by the living dead?!

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After the two relatively harmless SSH worms to hit the iPhone it was only a matter of time before someone would use the security hole for malicious intent. We must point out that this worm can only infect Jailbroken iPhones with the OpenSSH app installed, and the advise is to ensure you change the default password immediately or uninstall the app if you don’t use it.

The previous worms were just a stunt to warn users of OpenSSH, that their phones were unsecure by harmlessly changing the wallpaper. The second worm specifically changed it to the portrait of the singer Rick Roll which has now become an internet gag for being caught out or punk’d.

This new infection is far more dangerous, with the ability to steal important information from the iphone, possibly from a banking app, but also has botnet functionality to recruit other infected iphones for botnet attack. This new worm is only the tip of the iceberg where the harm is only limited by the imagination of the attacker.

The simplest of fixes it to remove the OpenSSh app as mentioned before or to change the SSH default password of  ’alpine’ to something new. Details on how to do this can be found HERE.

Remember that these worms can only affect Jailbroken iPhones with OpenSSH with the default password set!

If you are reading this at a sensible hour (i.e. not near midnight) then you will now be able to unlock your O2 iPhone completely legally and, perhaps better, completely free of charge! O2 lose their exclusivity on 10th November when Orange iPhone’s start to go on sale and it is clearly not a coincidence that this is also the date that you can unlock your iPhone on!

Pay Monthly customers can unlock their iPhone, free of charge, at any point during their contract but they will need to pay the remainder of the contract (either monthly or in one lump-sum). Pay and Go customers will need to have had their iPhone for a year and will need to pay £15 for the privelege.

For more information and to apply to have your iPhone unlocked please go to O2′s Unlock my iPhone page.

Is this evidence of Apple’s controversial Killswitch in action?

Please note this now appears to be a bug which is being fixed.

A recent app that I, like many others, bought on the AppStore with real money appears to have suddenly stopped working. A simple application called Night Stand, which is now copied by other app developers in true AppStore style, designed to simply display the time and alarm while dimming the screen. Not exactly a controversial app to say the least and has been available for some time! Now it seems that you can load the app but it simply won’t run.

This app has also been tested on a colleagues phone with the same results. This is not as a result of any updates as it was seen to work recently and, stranger still, the app has been pulled from the AppStore itself. As of this moment I have not yet been able to find any reason for it’s disappearance, but am more concerned about the fact that any app can seemingly be pulled from your device without warning or reason.

I paid good money for that app, all be it 59 pence but it is mine, or is it?

The amazing geohot has done it again. This guy has more talent in his little finger than I have in my whole body. His latest achievement is to have unlocked the iphone’s 05:11:07 Baseband. This is particularly important to those iphone users who want to jailbreak and unlock their iphones who accidentally updated their phones to the 3.1.2 firmware and lost the unlock.

Now through a stinging attack on the unlocking community Geohot is calling for information warfare on all the sites and sellers (SCUM) who continue to sell his and the Dev Teams freeware Software to unsuspecting users.
This was started in his recent blog posted at http://iphonejtag.blogspot.com/ where he publicly refused the $10,000 reward offered for the development of the unlock on the ground of his own integrity. Good on you! He is calling on all to inform the public that they should never have to buy any unlocking software as it will always remain FREE from the Dev Team and Geohot, and the more people who know this the less of a market these scum will have. So read his article, and pass it on!

Apple have released an update for the iPhone and iPod Touch update to take them to OS 3.1.2.

The release notes claim that 3.1.2:

• Resolves sporadic issues that may cause iPhone not to wake from sleep
• Resolves intermittent issue that may interrupt cellular network services until restart
• Fixes bug that could cause occasional crash during video streaming

The update is available from iTunes in the usual way!

There is an abundance of cases for the iPhone available varying in quality from cheap plastic to expensive leather ones. The range of cases from Trexta fit into the upper price range but are justified by the quality feel of the real leather used to manufacture them.

Trexta are a new company with manufacturing based in Turkey and also China. They are creating a worldwide distribution network and the cases will soon have a quality reputation rivalling that of Krussell or Proporta. The price ranges from about £20 through to the top of the range models at about £70.
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One of the more unusual iPhone accessories on show at IFA was the Vestel TV with iPhone Dock. This has a 19″ screen with the iPhone dock on the stand and comes in a number of colour variants . The TV has built in software to recognise and connect to the iPhone to provide AV services. Unfortunately this didn’t work on the one I tried very well. The iPhone claimed it was not compatible, then the TV hung when trying to connect to the iPhone.
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Hama the popular aftermarket accessory provider has 2 games grips for your iPhone. This week saw the the IFA Consumer Electronics show in Berlin, Germany. At the show Hama had a huge stand, most of which was for trade buyers only, but they did have some neat gadgets on display outside.

The best of the iPhone ones were games grips for the iPhone. They had 2 on display one a traditional shoot-em-up type grip, the other a racing steering wheel. Although neither of these grips offer any additional control features they do allow the iPhone to be firmly secured providing the freedom and confidence to be more aggressive during gameplay.
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