Cyrus on NPR — TOMORROW!

Dear Friends,

I’ve been informed that my radio piece previewing Macworld Expo will air on Morning Edition tomorrow (Jan. 14)!

It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams).

New York – 5 am to 9 am Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org
Washington, DC – 5 am to 10 am Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org
Los Angeles – 2 am to 9 am Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg
Boston – 6 am to 9 am Eastern – WGBH – 89.7 FM – www.wgbh.org
San Francisco – 3 am to 9 am Pacific – KQED – 88.5 FM – www.kqed.org

It will also be archived at npr.org and at my site if you miss it.

Lemme know if you hear it!

Update: Audio is here!

Locked vs. Unlocked: Opening Up Choice

NYT:

by Cyrus Farivar

Nokia, the world’s largest maker of cellphones, has been running ads that read, “Open to Anything” and “Unlock your potential.”

The company wants cellphone buyers to know that its phones can be used with whatever carrier they choose, unlike a certain other phone that has been getting considerably more attention lately: Apple’s iPhone. That phone is locked, meaning it is intended to be used with AT&T, the only carrier Apple chose in the United States.

A Nokia spokesman says that the advertising campaign is not aimed at the iPhone. “A lot of people interpreted it as a shot at another product,” said Keith Nowak, a Nokia spokesman. “It wasn’t its intention, to be honest.”

Indeed, most phones sold in the United States are locked into the carrier that sold them. Nearly all mobile phone providers discount the price of the handset in exchange for a fixed contract. But even some phones sold at full price without contracts remain locked.

Also be sure to click the link to hear me on the NYT Tech Talk podcast!

Unlocking an iPhone

Macworld:

By Cyrus Farivar

If you’re one of the million people who’ve purchased an iPhone since the end of June, you probably signed up with Apple’s exclusive carrier in the U.S., AT&T, when you activated your phone. That means your iPhone identifies itself to AT&T’s network using an AT&T SIM card, a smart card that’s located in a small tray between your iPhone’s sleep/wake button and its recessed headphone jack.

But what if you’re planning a trip to Europe and rather than paying AT&T to use the networks of its European partners, you want to take advantage of the favorable rates and local phone numbers offered by replacing your AT&T SIM card with a pre-paid European card? Or what if you’d prefer to use T-Mobile as your cellular provider, rather than AT&T?

In the past month several groups have announced that they’ve found a way to “unlock” the iPhone, allowing it to use a SIM card from any provider. (Keep in mind that this is only half the story: the iPhone uses the GSM radio band for its communications, meaning that it’ll only work with providers that use the GSM network. In the U.S., that means T-Mobile and AT&T.)

In August, a group of hackers demonstrated a method for unlocking SIM cards and sold its software to resellers, who in turn began selling it to the public for as much as $100 last week.

But another group has came up with its own hack that, with the help of some free, open-source software, lets you unlock your iPhone in about an hour, free of charge. Below, I’ll show you how it works — and it does work, because I’ve used this technique to unlock my own phone. (One important caveat: Certain AT&T-only features, such as Visual Voicemail, will not work when you’re connected to other cellular networks.)

How to unlock your iPhone

Booya! I finally got my iPhone yesterday and spent last night and this morning figuring out how to GSM unlock it — letting me use my T-Mobile SIM card with ease.

How’d I do it? I’ll have a forthcoming article for Macworld explaining soon, but until then, you can read this guide and thank the good folks at ModMyiPhone.com. I followed their instructions — but after three failed tries, I installed AppTapp before doing the faux activation, and that seemed to work.

Woohoo!

iPhone dilemma

Ok kids, I need your advice on this one.

My big problem with the iPhone has been that it’s just been too friggin’ expensive for my budget. However, all of that has changed now with the price drop of the remainder of the 4GB iPhones that Apple is selling directly from their site. My brother works at Apple and can get a bit of a discount too. When it’s all said and done, I can get a 4GB iPhone, after taxes (free shipping), for $275.

Currently, I use an (unlocked) Treo 650. I figure I could sell it on craigslist for $200 (including four wall chargers, a car charger and a 2GB SD card). So that would be a net price of $70.

So what’s the problem? I’m not 100% sure that I’m going to be in-country for the next two years. I’ll be here definitely at least one year, but two? That’s a hard commitment to make.

Should I just take the plunge and worry about transferring my phone to someone else later by using Cellswapper or one of the others? Or is that too big a risk?

Update: So I found out that I can go the GoPhone route, which gets me out of the contract bit. However, if I do that, then I can’t port a number. Hrm. Seems like if I get a new number that’s not a huge deal, hrm?

Update 2: So I called AT&T and they said that I should sign up for the postpaid, then take it into a store and switch it over to a GoPhone at no additional charge AND keep the number that I ported from the postpaid plan. Booya! iPhone here I come!

Update 3: I called AT&T once more just to make sure, and when I explained the above scenario to a different person, they said that I should just sign up for GoPhone straightaway (“no special conditions required, right?” — so I don’t know how that squares with having to fail a credit check) and that I could port my number no problem, and to just go into a store if I had any issues. So we’ll see what happens hopefully next week when I get the phone.

Why Is DRM-Free Music Tagged With Name and E-Mail? Apple Keeps Mum

Wired News:

by Cyrus Farivar
June 01, 2007 | 6:36:35 PM

Apple has declined to explain why its new DRM-free music files are watermarked with users’ names and e-mail addresses.

Earlier this week, Apple iTunes 7.2 brought the new ability to download tracks from EMI Records without copy protection. But the unprotected files are labeled with the buyer’s details, leading some to wonder if Apple is appending the information as an anti-piracy measure.

But Apple is remaining mum about its reasoning.

An Apple spokesman suggested by e-mail that Wired News contact Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research who has been briefed about iTunes Plus. The Apple spokesman didn’t respond to further requests for comment.

The Pleasures of Hacking the Apple TV

PC World:

It’s been barely a week since the release of the Apple TV, the new box from Apple that allows for streaming video to a television, but hackers from coast-to-coast have already been able to turn the $300 multimedia box into a full-fledged computer.

The Apple TV comes with a stripped-down version of Apple’s OS X, but retains many of its basic features, such as directory structure and file format.

Hacking the Apple TV is the latest in a series of hardware hacks on multimedia devices, including the: XBox 360 and the TiVo. Each time, hackers hope to extend functionality of the device beyond its original intent.

TIn just over a week, hackers have been able to upgrade the Apple TV’s 40GB hard drive (derided by many as being too small for any serious media collection) and enable secure shell access (SSH) to the machine, among other things. Most recently, and the most practical hack so far to date (announced on March 29) is to enable the USB port, which had been disabled by Apple in software.

David Boyk, on the Apple Remote

The Scene:

David Boyk is IMing with me, seated somewhere in India in front of his swanky new MacBook Pro.

Boyk: dude, this apple remote thing?
Boyk: fucking awesome
Boyk: all i require from life is a way to make fun little 3D things happen on my screen without touching my computer

Fin.

Would you rent a MacBook for under three bucks a day — for three years?

So here’s the deal: Apple France and French ISP Orange are hooking up to provide French consumers with a rented MacBook and 1 Mbps DSL for €60 ($79.50) a month. That works out to about €2 a day. (You can upgrade to 8 Mbps DSL for an additional €5 per month.)

The catch is that you have to sign up for three years, but that includes three years of Apple Care.

Louis-Pierre Wenes, executive director of France Telecom’s domestic operations compared this deal to getting a €150 rebate on the price of a MacBook (€1099) plus an additional two years of AppleCare (€319) — in that €35 that pays for the computer x 36 months = €1260. However, M. Wenes didn’t explain what happens at the end of the three-year deal. (There also appears to be a rent-to-buy option, but it’s unclear how that works out.)

Either way, if you in France and you’re one of the first 200 people to sign up, Orange will toss you an iPod shuffle for an additional euro.

I know a lot of people who would take this deal (possibly myself included) in a heartbeat.

[via MuniWireless]