Iphone successfully unlocked in Brazil

Hey guys, I am finally using my iPhone, as a phone, in Brazil!! It’s WORKING perfectly, thanks for the fantastic tutorial from http://iphone.unlock.no/ everything was very smooth and the help from Azamba. I am going to describe the whole process later.

Here is the proof

All iPhone SIM unlock methods

Finally the iPhone was unlocked, last week all blogs and gadget oriented sites were talking about two new hacks, one of them I even started but didn’t have the right tools to open my iPhone, and the other wasn’t publicly released yet but will be very soon.

Well, basically there is three known ways to unlock the iPhone to use it with any operator worldwide, the first one is through Bladox TurboSim, which allows you to spoof the phone making it think it has a valid AT&T simcard and actually use your operator’s simcard. No need to disassemble your precious iPhone, just some hacks (you still need to jailbreak it and install the SSHd) with some code that runs on your iPhone and the Turbosim “adaptor”. The problem is to get your hands on TurboSIM, even if you are inclined to spend a thousand bucks to get out your hands on it, you will not be able to find any TurboSIM units. The guys at Bladox had a surprise when someone found a way to use their product, a SIM toolkit developer product, to unlock the iPhone, then the demand was monstrous and they couldn’t keep up. Right now there is no schedule to the next arrival of TurboSIM units. Other bad thing is that Bladox is based in Czchec Republic, so shipping can be very expensive.

The second unlock method is a hardware based one with some advanced software moves, was announced by George Hotz, he was one of the member of the team that has been working on the iPhone unlock project since the launch date, The iPhone Dev Wiki. They have been working in developing tools and hacks and trying several different styles to hack the Iphone. One of the most known methods is through the use of JTAGs. The problem with this is that you need to disassemble your iPhone and make some soldering and scrubbing on the circuits (track A17), this is very advanced and besides that you still need to get your hands on hacking firmwares and extracting binary parts of existing softwares and so on. I even tried to do it, but unfortunately, I didn’t had the appropriate tools to open it.

And, finally the third method, comes from the guys at IphoneSIMfree.com which announced last Friday they successfully achieved the so much awaited software based unlock method. It was confirmed by Engadget that it works and the whole process takes only a couple of minutes, anyway you still need to activate your iPhone through iAsign or iActivator . The Iphone SIm Free.com also sad they will release the unlock software for sale this week, so I am waiting to the get access to it and tell you if it really works outside US.

Here is some pictures from Engadget

Gallery: iPhone unlocked

And the video that proves it really works :

Trying to share technical knowledge within a company

I am an optimistic most of the time, I really believe that people, mostly technical people, always want to evolve, to learn new stuff and to try new ways to do their day by day tasks. Thinking about that I always wanted to start some initiative to share the knowledge in the company and to create an environment of mutual contribution, but to accomplish that first we must satisfy some basic requirements:

• people with knowledge to share
• an environment with freedom to speak about anything
• people who wanna learn and grow

This is very basic, right? You need people, with some knowledge to share in an environment that allows you to speak freely and in the other hand you need people who wants to learn and to discuss.

We are trying to build this kind of initiative at the company, but it can be surprisingly difficult to implement such a obvious thing, something everyone should clearly understand the benefits.

From the beginning, it all started with the international conventions we always sent our technicians, the problem is that we always sent people to international events but when they return, we never took the initiative to share what they saw and experienced. That’s a big issue, we can’t afford to choose one person out of some hundreds of employees and be comfortable with that person keeping everything it learned for himself.

Then we started a weekly technical meeting, open to everyone at the company, but specially driven to developers and technical teams (Sys Admin, Telecom, Support, Developers, etc), the first 2 meetings went relatively well, with reasonable number of attendees. The third only had 1/4 of the previous audiences, then I thought: ” it may be the subject”, was to specific, besides the point that was a very interesting technical presentation. Then the next presentation was worst even with a relevant subject for most of the technical employees. Ok, so “Houston we have a problem”, discussing with the other managers they started to send messages to their employees asking then to attend the event, communicating that the technical presentations (we called it TechTalks, original hum?) was something and to pay attention to it. Boom, the next session was packed, totally full, lesson learned: obviously communication is very important, you need to spread the word throughout the company with e-mails and posters with a clear content programming for the next sessions.

Then after another two sessions we experienced another disaster in number of attendees, the I sad “should be some critical project the developers were working on and didn’t have time to attend”. But we know that there are always lots of projects behind the schedule and lots of priorities on our daily tasks, but we need to plan and to destinate part of our time to learn and talk with other employees, with different skills and points of view, I believe this is strategic for the company.

So after some months doing this I’ve learned another thing, it`s difficult to find people that want learn and share. The target audience matter indeed, they need to understand that this initiative, these sessions, aren’t to satisfy the managers or the directors, it’s for themselves, it’s a time they have to learn and to get better, to grow, and unfortunately there are people who doesn’t really care about it and that’s a problem. In the end it always get us back to the attitude, to the technical profile we have in the company. It’s necessary to change the culture, the attitude and I still believe this knowledge sharing thing is very important and I am going to keep pushing this initiative as far as its necessary so it will walk by itself. But the culture issue…. hummm… that is very, very… very complicated and I going to talk about it in the future posts.

Symbian S60 makes wish list with DIGG style

Besides the fact I recently bought an Iphone, my current every day phone is a Nokia E61. That’s a really awesome smartphone, It has the most popular mobile OS in the planet – not kidding – the symbian S60 is actually the most distributed smartphone OS. It has lots of features out of the box, like: native SIP/VoIP support (that’s really cool) , Bluetooth support for transfer/FTP, DUN and OBEX, native Exchange ActiveSync, To Do list app, Full HTML Browser (using the same WebKit iPhone’s Safari is based on), Nokia Maps with voice guidance, GPS integration, and TONS of applications being distributed through a very healthy ecosystem.

So, I am always looking for what’s new to S60 phones, some good references to be updated are the E-series.org blog, the S60.com Blogs, always keep an eye on Nokia’s software update list and All About Symbian is mandatory as well.

Well , going directly to what this post is up to, S60 just launched a ‘DIGG like’ wish list site for requesting features, I’ve already dugg some features. It seems that some companies are, finally, willing to know what is the most important features from the costumers point of view and is letting them choose the priority of these requests. The first big company to spread this initiative was Dell with it’s IdeaStorm site, which resulted on the Ubuntu Linux OS to be an option for some of their laptops and desktops.

So, if you are a S60 phone user don’t forget to give your votes and let’s pray to be listen.

An apple in my gadget farm

I definitively have a thing for gadgets, thank God my wife loves me and understands my needs related to electronics and my obsession with BestBuy, eBay, the chinese little store with that, really necessary, electronic stuff

Well, one of my e-passions are mobile gadgets, in special the smart ones. So last week, I was organizing some old boxes (yes, I keep the boxes) and found the boxes of my SonyEricsson P800, the old mate P900, the Treo 680 (which I gave to my wife) and more recently my Nokia E61 (SIP til the end) . The objective of this post is to say that I finally got an Apple device, and it is an iPhone, which unfortunately I can’t fully use here in Brazil (at least as a phone) because the guys out there are still trying to get rid of the AT&T lock.

I am a long time Apple critic/admirer, I am a PC guy, an open source guy, and Apple is purely against anything that means open, everything they develop is tightly attached to their own products and systems and you can’t do anything, Apple doesn’t want you to do it (at least not officially), it’s a totally controlled environment. But they are really good at Marketing, Usability, Design, the Experience, the MacOSX is really good and the community around Apple products is something for a MBA case study. These attributes are the reason I got an iPhone, when you enter into an Apple Store and try the Iphone it’s really something unique. So I got mine a few weeks ago and now I can write about my impressions on it.

I have some mixed feelings about the iPhone so far, it is a beautiful piece of hardware and the OS interface is really simple and surprising and now I have a “Unix like” device that fits on my pocket (if properly hacked), but that’s it. In terms of “out of the box” functionality, the iPhone is very limited, I feel like I’ve bought a $600 alpha product, anyway Apple is not known by it’s concern in having the most complete product (I mean, in number of features and compatibility, they don’t allow you to use Ogg Vorbis!!!). Apple is known for the way it packs the whole experience, the box, the interface, the form factor, the ads, the environment at the Apple Store, the whole thing is perfectly prepared to seduce you.

You can find several sites with lists for what is missing and what is broke on iPhone, but what I really miss and would make me move away from my E61 definitively is: Copy and Paste, video recording, digital zoom on the camera, native multi-IM client, native To-Do list app, native integration with MS Exchange ActiveSync (not just IMAP), full bluetooth OBEX support for transfering and receiving files (ANY kind of files) , a SIP/VoIP client and, of course, an unlock alternative solution (that’s really optional if they keep the current hacks working like they are doing with AppleTV)

What is being really fun for me right now, is to research and try all the hacks that are popping up all over the web, and keep updated with the community, they are really mapping and documenting everything, without any help from Apple. I’ve even installed an Apache on it

Now talking about Brazil, there are some rumors in the market that Vivo and Claro intend to launch the iPhone, and already started negotiations with the big fruit company. Of course, the price will be prohibitive, as always happens down here, and they will probably link it to the same 2 years kind of contract AT&T is offering back in US.

Anyway… more about my experiences with iPhone to come.