iPhone sales seen at 3.5 million in two years

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Apple expects to sell 3.5 million iPhones in Russia in the next two years, according to market sources familiar with new deals being struck by Russian carriers.

Up to 600,000 iPhones have already flooded into Russia through unauthorized sales but now at least two carriers have signed an official framework agreement with the manufacturer and one more deal is expected next week, according to analysts and market sources.

A market source told Reuters on Thursday Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), Russia's largest carrier, had agreed with Apple to sell iPhones, probably starting in October

Eldar Murtazin, an analyst with Moscow-based Mobile Research Group, said he had information that MTS was targeting sales of 1 million iPhones within the next two years.

"Total sales by the Big Three carriers will amount to 3.5 million iPhones within the next two years," Murtazin said, citing sources familiar with the negotiations.

MTS and its key rivals, Vimpelcom and MegaFon, which are also talking to Apple, declined to comment.

Apple said it aimed to sell 10 million iPhones worldwide this year, though analysts said it would beat its target after its new model, which supports third generation (3G) high speed data, sold at a rate of 1 million units in the first weekend.

IPhones have not been sold officially in Russia but have become a status symbol in the Russian capital with handsets brought into the country in suitcases or by courier.
Murtazin said the start of authorized sales is unlikely to trigger a big wave of consumer demand.

RISKY FOR CARRIERS

Carriers are expected to buy the iPhone from Apple for $399 and sell for 24,000 roubles ($990), Murtazin said, well below the price at which the gadget is currently offered by unauthorized dealers, but above a minimum price at which the iPhone can be bought abroad.

Murtazin said operators had been unable to obtain commitments on volume from the independent retailers who sell phones on their behalf.

"This number (3.5 million) could turn out to be inflated... The operators could lose money because they took all risks upon themselves having failed to dictate terms to retail chains through which they will sell the iPhones," said Murtazin.

Ivan Shuvalov, analyst at Alfa Bank, said the Russian operators could fail to meet the sales target and lose money if the price proves to be too high.

But if Russian consumers are willing to buy at that price, operators will win because smartphones stimulate subscribers to use more value-added services such as mobile Internet and data transmission, Shuvalov said.

Russian operators get the bulk of their revenues from voice traffic, with a much smaller share of value added data services than Western operators.

OpenClip.org - Working Hard to make iPhone Cut/Paste a Reality

OpenClip is not an app, but rather a community who, like everyone else, wants to have Cut/Paste functionality in the iPhone/iPod Touch. So much so that they’ve taken the initiative to make this a reality by sharing their knowledge with others so that developers can integrate this feature into their software. No need to jailbreak or download a particular plug-in to avail of this feature. Just get yourself one of the participating apps, and you can use cut/paste in the app itself as well as with the others in the select group.

Kudos to these guys for taking the time and effort to bring this desired functionality to the iPhone even if it’s limited to a handful of apps only. I wonder when will Apple finally come to their senses and make it an official feature on the device?

Cut and Paste for iPhone from Cali Lewis on Vimeo.

Top 15 Free iPhone Apps - Install Them All Now

Still couldn’t get enough of those iPhone apps? Or have you burnt out your wallet buying those 10 paid apps we told you about a few weeks ago?

Well, if budget is the problem, why not install these free apps instead? Most of them are free games, some are free utilities, but one thing is for sure, your iPhone is gonna get cramped up with these top 20 free apps. Enjoy them babies!

Cannon (Games)
When Cannon’s developer say that this game is addicting, they were not joking. Right after I downloaded it into my iPod Touch, I couldn’t stop playing for one hour. But then I realized I have to write this article, so I needed to stop. The game lets you take charge of your own Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon. You need to destroy enemies positioned on the right part of the screen with different elevations blocking your Cannon’s trajectory. Good luck and have fun!

Tris (Games)
Yes folks, that old-addicting game of falling blocks known as Tetris has made its way into the iPhone and iPod Touch. This time around, the game looks much elegant and attractive. And you can save your game then reply to an SMS first before going to where you left off in the game.

Brain Tuner (Games)
Our brain needs a good exercise everyday. A simple Mathematical problems a day would make our brain fit. And that’s what Brain Tuner aims to do. Many people say this game is pretty addicting, and I will have to prove that after writing this post.

Chimps Ahoy! Lite (Games)
Brick breaking games are always addicting, and this Lite version of Chimps Ahoy is not an exception. Using the iPhone’s multi-touch display to bounce coconuts back and forth between the Chimps, breaking bricks, collecting treasures, picking up power-ups and taking out enemies along the way. You would certainly waste too many precious hours playing this game on your iPhone.

Hangman (Games)
Yup, everybody’s favorite word-guessing game also gets its iPhone/Ipod version. Get ready to spend countless hours guessing the words or else get hanged most of the time.

Baloonacy (Games)
Your task is to guide your cutesy balloons through various mazes avoiding walls or else your balloon will bursts. You can use keys to open walls and gains extra lives for your balloons. The colorful mazes would certainly live you in awe when you play this game.

Pop Quiz (Games)
Pop Quizz hot shot! Test your knowledge on pop culture trivia categorized into movie, music, celebrities, movie quotes and fill in the ___. You can post your final score as well in the Pop Quiz community leader board.

reMovem (Games)
It’s a pretty simple game with lots and lots of colorful balls. All you need to do is tap your screen to select two or more balls of the same color, tap again to remove the balls, and remove bigger blocks of balls to get more points. Easy?

Units (Utilities)
The first non-game apps that hit the top ten free iPhone apps is actually a units conversion tool. Yeah, many people still needs kind of tools, for quick conversion of units of measurements.

TiltSnake (Games)
Time for the classic snake game to get its iPhone version. Well the classic arcade game, TiltSnake for the iPhone lets you guide your snake into reaching its longest size by guiding it to the food that appears on the screen. This game features, retro style graphics, accelerometer based gameplay, increasingly difficult levels, high score list, and sensitivity settings.

SimplifyMedia (Music)
Our eleventh iPhone apps is also a non-game apps. Its a music utility that lets you listen to your music collection from your home computer on your iPhone or iPod Touch. It also allows you to stream music for up to 30 friends and view lyrics and artists bios as well.

Sol Free Solitaire (Games)
A free and simple solitaire game for the iPhone and iPod touch. Features easy to read screens, unlimited undo, foundation and auto-play, statistics, timer, scoring, moves tracking, in-game rules, tap card movement, and no interferenece with iPod audio.

myLighter (Utilities)
Next, we have another non-game apps for the iPhone. This apps is a simple one with a very useful feature. It turns your iPhone into high-luminating Lighter which makes it perfect during rock concerts, emergency power black outs.

OmNomNom (Classic)
It’s another version of the old classic snake arcade game. This time the developers created it with a touch of old-phone interface for the classic feel. It would certainly remind you of the good-old-non-colored Nokia days. The game includes 3 difficulty levels and 3 playing fields among other features as well.

TanzenLite (Games)
An adaptation of the classic Tangrams puzzle game which have been challenging minds for centuries. Features large intuitive controls, solve puzzles in any order, excellent replay value, variety of puzzle difficulty, puzzle memory.

[Cellphonenews]

Apple updates iPhone software to fix glitches

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Inc has issued a software update for the latest iPhone to help fix connection problems that led to a flurry of online complaints from customers, a European mobile service provider said on Tuesday.

T-Mobile, owned by Deutsche Telekom AG, said the software was available for users to download to their iPhones on Tuesday, but that it was not yet clear if the upgrade would fix all the connection problems.

"We have had complaints about connectivity in the Netherlands but have not had more complaints than usual for a 3G phone in Germany. Our technicians said today Apple has issued a software update but it is too early to tell if the problems are solved," a T-Mobile spokesman said.

AT&T Inc the only U.S. network operator carrying the iPhone, confirmed that Apple had provided a software update but declined to give details about what it was aimed at fixing.
Apple, which sold about a million iPhones around the launch weekend in July, was not immediately available for comment.

One of the key attractions of the latest iPhone is its faster, third-generation (3G) Web connections when compared with the first iPhone that was launched in mid-2007.
However, users around the world have complained about dropped calls and inconsistent Internet speeds, with the phone often reverting to a slower technology known as Edge even in 3G areas.

Nomura analyst Richard Windsor and media reports have blamed faulty software on an Infineon Technologies AG chip for the problems. Infineon declined to comment about iPhone but noted that its chips work on 3G phones from suppliers such as Samsung Electronics Co without problems.
The iPhone 3G has gone on sale in about 22 countries since its launch on July 11.

Winpwn 2.0 Guide

Here is a working winpwn 2.0 guide updated to include 2.0.1 firmware. Here is what you need:

1) Winpwn 2.0.0.4 or newer.
2) iTunes 7.7 or newer.
3) Boot images for 3.9 and 4.6.
4) The proper restore file. Get your 2g restore image or 3g restore image.

Let’s get started.

Step 1: Install winpwn, iTunes, and extract your restore images and bootloaders to your desktop. Note: if you have a previous copy of winpwn installed, uninstall it before installing the new one.

Step 2: Connect your iPhone to your PC and load up winpwn. You will see this screen:

Step 3: Winpwn will not allow you to do anything without selecting a firmware image. So, click “Browse .ipsw” button and select your firmware image from your desktop. Note: winpwn will determine if you have an iPod, an iPhone 3g, or an iPhone 2g based off the firmware image you select and downloaded. So make sure you got the correct image. 2g and 3g iPhones have different firmwares!
Step 4: Next, we need to build the iPhone software image. Click “IPSW Builder” and you will be presented with some screens. Start on the Applications tab. On this screen you must select “Install Cydia”. If you need youtube patched then select also “YouTube activation fix”. You do not need to select this if you have a contract carrier such as AT&T. As far as installer goes, feel fee to select it if you want. But do not select installer instead of Cydia. Cydia has all the apps. Installer does not and installer is still very beta as of August 9, 2008 and contains virtually no packages to install. If you select installer, also select Cydia.

Step 5: Click the custom images tab. Here you can select custom boot images if you care to. This is optional.

Step 6: Click the custom payload tab. Here you can select some payloads in .tar format. At this time there are a couple built in payloads so there is nothing to do here. If you make your own payloads for packages you can select them here. So we are skipping this screen.
Step 7: Click Advanced tab. This is a critical tab. If you have a contract carrier such as AT&T you do not need to unlock. So you must make sure everything is unchecked here. Again, if you have a contract carrier, select nothing here! If you do not have a contract carrier, you will need to use this to configure activation and unlocking. Check activate phone, Enable Baseband Update, Unlock Baseband, Autodelete Bootneuter.app. Click the two bootloader file buttons and browse for your 3.9 and 4.6 firmware we downloaded at the start of this guide. Your finished screen needs to look something like this:

Note: If you are activating here by checking the “activate iphone” you should also patch youtube on the first applications screen.

Step 8: Partition resizer. Here is the partition resizer screen. With the current version fo Winpwn, move this to 550 mb. The extra packages will fill the root partition before Cydia gets to run and move things about. Do not make it any larger though because Cydia moves your apps around properly to the larger partition so if you resize this larger here you are just losing space.

Step 9: Build the custom IPSW. Click “Build .ipsw” at the bottom of the window. Note: save your file to some place sensible so you can find it. The default location is going to be hard to find. Try your documents or your desktop. Winpwn will crank away and finally you will see the success box:

Step 10: Note: if you are currently pwned, (phone boots with custom logo still) you can skip to step 12 and restore with the image you just made. Doing this step will not hurt but is not required for you.

Back to the main screen, select iPwner. This will ask you to select your custom firmware we just built in step 8. So select that file.

You will get a success message and you are done with winpwn!

Step 11: Get your phone into DFU mode. You cannot use any tools to do this. It must be hardware DFU mode only done by pressing the buttons on your device.

DFU Mode

DFU (Device Firmware Upgrade) mode is not the same as restore mode. DFU mode bypasses the current OS installed and allows you to upgrade or downgrade your OS. If you are getting errors trying to restore in iTunes, DFU mode is very likely for you.

This is how to achieve DFU mode. You can do it on every phone:

• Attach the phone to the pc
• Turn the phone off
• Hold power and home together for *exactly* 10 seconds
• Release power but keep holding home until the pc beeps as a USB device is recognized.
• At no point will the display come on. Now your restore should work.

Having problems? Try adjusting the 10 seconds to be slightly less like 9 seconds, then 8, then 7. It’s a tricky timing but you will eventually get it.

Here is an alternate method:

• Hook up the phone powered on to the PC
• Now hold home / power until the phone turns off and keep holding for 10 seconds. If the phone ever turns on during this phase,start over and hold for less time.
• Now release power and continue holding home until the PC recognizes the phone.
• I don’t like this method as much because there are “rumors” that it may cause some 1604 errors in the restore. I am not convinced of that though.

This works on every device so keep trying if you are having problems.

Step 12: While in DFU mode, load iTunes 7.7, and restore using shift-restore. Load the custom firmware image we made. And after about 10-15 minutes you are done.

Note: if your device was already pwned and you are just upgrading, you do not need DFU mode. Normal recovery mode may work fine. You should try either one and if you have problems try the other.

Troubleshooting:

If you are getting errors in iTunes less than 20 you are not in DFU mode. Refer to my DFU guide.

If you are getting 160x errors (1600, 1601, 1602, 1604) you may have used the wrong firmware image for your device. Make sure you got the correct image for your 2g or 3g phone. They are not the same. For help on iTunes errors refer to my restore guide.

If you are using winpwn version earlier than 2.0.0.3 you may see 160x errors.

If the last tab only lets you select activate, (step 7) you probably loaded the 3g firmware image. iPhone 3g cannot be unlocked at this time. If you have 2g, you loaded the wrong firmware image to start.

If you have no signal on a contract carrier (AT&T for example), you probably activated but did not unlock (checked the activate box on step 7). If you do not have a contract carrier, you need to unlock. Redo the steps again making sure not to make this mistake.

If your mail crashes after you sync your backup, use BossPrefs, more, fix user dir permissions.

If iTunes will not stop asking you if you want to restore your backup, see this.

Guide from: http://sleepers.net/news/2008/07/25/winpwn-20-guide/

How to unlock iPhone 3G with FuriouSim

iPhone 3G unlocking with FuriouSim