I was laying in bed awake the other night and after not being able to sleep for a while I decided (don’t ask why) that I wanted to take another crack at updating my iPhone firmware. I have a first generation iPhone which I unlocked using Ziphone almost a year ago. This was (to my chagrin) just a month or two before Rogers announced that they were bringing the iPhone 3G to Canada – as a result I ended up paying a lot more money for an older model of the iPhone. Dumb.
Anyway, I’d been itching to upgrade to the 2.0 firmware but instead of releasing an update for his software, Zibri (the guy behind Ziphone) decided to embark on some long, melodramatic campaign against “the scene” or whatever. If you ask me, he just couldn’t figure out how to crack the update and decided to whine about it instead of fessing up. In any case, the Ziphone update never materialized so I started looking for other options. I came across one that seemed promising but ended up actually nuking my phone, which I had to restore using the old version of Ziphone. I gave up after that.
So after getting out of bed I did a quick Google search for unlocking a first generation iPhone with 2.2.1 firmware, and I came across this article which turned out to be an excellent, step-by-step tutorial on how to do exactly what I wanted using QuickPwn for Windows. The whole process, including downloading all the necessary files, took just about 20 minutes and after that I had a working, up-to-date iPhone.
This update was such a huge difference that I felt like I had just gotten a new phone. The addition of Apple’s App Store and some awesome free apps instantly breathed some new life into my tired 2G iPhone. One of the first apps I downloaded, and by far one of the coolest, was the iTunes Remote app. It lets you control your iTunes over your wifi network, which is pretty neat and comes in really handy when I’m listening to music from outside on the patio or downstairs. Does anyone have any other recommended apps?
Now the only thing I feel lacking is the GPS feature of the iPhone 3G, and a data plan. That’s right, I don’t have a data plan for my iPhone. It never really mattered before because it wasn’t very useful, but now that I have access to all these cool apps, I want to be able to use them even when I’m not able to jump onto a wireless network. Does anyone have any experience getting hooked up with a decent data plan for the 2G iPhone with Rogers?
