Prepare to Jailbreak iOS 4.1 for iPhone 3G Part 1

It's the jailbreak blogs turn tonight folks so if iPhones mean nothing to you or your iPhone means more than life itself you may want to skip this one.

At some point tomorrow Apple will release iOS 4.1 for all variants of iPhone and some ipod touches. The new software offers a few new features, Ping (a kind of face book of music that I don't really see the point of but that will no doubt become something you can't live without), Game Center which offers online gaming and high def video for the iPhone 4. All good stuff but given the hassle of re-jail breaking and then restoring all my apps and all my settings probably I could bear to live without these changes. However.....

There will also be a camera improvement called HSD. It's not available for the 3g but I've already read that, a bit like multitasking, jail broken 3gs will have an app that allows them to use it. Given how shit my phones camera is any software that improves the resolution and quality of a shot is a must. In addition to this Mr Jobs has said that it will allow the operating system to run faster on a 3g. Thank you thank you thank you.

iOS 4.0 did bring some functionality and gimmicks that made it worth upgrading but god has it slowed the 3g down. I know that that's probably not helped by jail breaking the phone to over perform but it was seriously faster and less buggy, jail broken or not, before 4 came along. There are You Tube videos showing how slow the three has become (jail broken or not).

So I want to upgrade to 4.1 as quickly as possible but, as always, there's a problem. Someone has to jailbreak it before I upgrade or I'd lose loads of functionality. My phone is themed to within an inch of its life. It doesn't look anything like an iphone. I'd lose that. My 3g reception goes to sleep with my phone saving battery life. I'd lose that. If I find something in google maps I've got a button that allows me to navigate there using tomtom. I'd lose the button and the tomtom. I've got an app that makes my Internet think that 3g is wifi and so allows live streaming. I'd lose that. Multi tasking. Yep that too. Forget one or two stolen apps it's the functionality I'd miss.

I suspect that the dev-team are pretty much good to go with some jailbreaks for this one. They may even be ready already and I'm hoping that some version of Redsn0w is pretty much ready to launch with a version of jailbreak me following within the first fortnight. But even with this it can still be a hassle so I've taken some steps to prepare in advance. Watch this space and I'll let you know how they go.

I use a winterboard theme called iEllegance. However I wasn't 100% on the out of the packet theme so I replaced the clock with a natty HTC flip clock, I've created Icons for my specific app set and I've changed the wallpaper and lock screen. In addition I've fixed some glitches so I've removed the themes dock and restored the original and I've taken the shadows off buttons because they were offset. As a newbie that has taken bloody ages. When you re-jailbreak you start again. In other words download the default theme, download the clock,, find icons and make others etc... To avoid this I have copied the theme folder completely from my phone using a free software called WinSCP. (think it's this they are talking about when they mention SSHing something to your phone. It shows you the contents of the phone as a windows style file system and you just copy and paste files once you figure out your way around) Hopefully after jail breaking all I need to do is get winterboard running and then paste my theme back into the library where it's supposed to go.

On that note, I've also copied the winterboard application along with a few others. What's the chances that I can paste them straight back in without having to download again?

Until I try I've no idea if any or all of this will work. Without a jailbreak it's a waste of effort. Provided I can view and change the file structure of my phone then I stand a chance of making this work. So even if all the jailbreakers could achieve was to get OpenSSH running on the phone then we'd be good to go.

If all this did work then, who knows, I could be one step closer to understanding what all those dudes at the dev team are up to to jailbreak the phone in the first place.

It goes without saying that you should back your phone up on iTunes before upgrading to 4.1 or even considering jailbreaking. but even here there may be a slight problem:

I think Apple might be up to something a bit sneaky but I could just be being paranoid. When I turned iTunes on today it ceashed for the very first time with an error. Synchost had stopped responding tell microsoft about this prob. I thought nothing of it, as most people probably wouldn't, shut iTunes down and restarted. Now when I sync I get 'ITunes was unable to load provider data from sync services. Reconnect or ty again later'. The paranoid side of me thinks that this is some sort of software change aimed at either preventing jailbreaking or, more likely, unlocking. Of course it could just be that my software is nuts but there was no event leading up to this. After some experiments I did find that if I shut down MY3G, enabled 3g reception through SBSettings and then let the phone lock itself before connecting to iTunes then everything seemed to work but I've no idea why.

As soon as I've got any news on a jailbreak I'll be doing another iBlog. Hope that means that we will speak soon.

Interesting times.

TQ

TQs' Theory of iVolution

Welcome to the weekly(ish)iPhone blog/update. Some regular readers will not be too surprised to see that I have now become obsessed with the iPhone. Not that I'm an addictive personality type in any way (fags, booze) but this whole iPhone thing has me hooked. I thought I loved my HTC but it wasn't true love. The problem with the HTC (mine is a Touch Diamond with windows mobile version 6)is that it's windows based so works intuitively, syncs with my PC and basically does what I want to do when I want to do it. What fun is that?

Apple have created a phone that is entirely designed around controlling what you can do and when. Not only controlling you but even controlling the developers. That's where the fun starts. Someone bought one of these iPhones but didn't like being stuck with a single network provider. Realising that the phone was just a small PC they found a way to view the file structure of the phone and remove the network provider restriction. Opening the file structure became known as jail breaking, whilst altering the default provider is known as unlocking.

Once you can see the file structure (jail breaking) it's a relatively simple matter to start changing things and adding things. It's no more or less complicated than changing the wall paper on your PC. What's more if you get stuck there are a million forums that will help. (remind me to get back to that) If you get really stuck you can just restore your phone to its un-jail broken state and start again.

The changes that you make to a jail broken phone will be completely lost whenever iPhone upgrade the software which, in my experience, is about every six - eight weeks for minor tweaks and every six months for major operating system type overhauls. The tweaks aren't that big a problem as they are mostly attempts to fix or speed up a process and the Dev-Team as the jail breakers call themselves tend to be ahead of apple on this constantly. The result, a jail broken phone on OS4 is just as, if not more, up to date as an non jail broken phone using OS 4.02 so there is no real need to upgrade. Jail breakers however can't take advantage of an update until the Dev-Team have checked it out and worked out how to obtain the file structure again. For owners of the new iPhone four this is developing into quite an issue. For owners of older cheaper phones like my iPhone 3g with 8gb memory this is no problem at all and an up to date break is usually available within the first 24 hours of an update.

When you upgrade you have to redo the jail break. That involves several things. You need to run software to jailbreak. You need to install software providers known as 'repos' (I need three of these) and then you need re-install the apps that those programs provide. I use Appulous which allows you to install apps without using iTunes (perhaps apps that cost money that you might like to try before purchasing), my3g which makes my phone treat 3g reception as wifi so that I can watch TV on my phone even without wifi, iAddkiller which beats off pop up advertising that you should be forced to suffer according to apple, Finally you need Appsync. What Appsync does is allows you to view your iPhones file structure in the same way that you would view the C drive on your PC with folders, subfolders and files. After this is done you can also re-install your, perhaps, unpaid for apps which will still show against your phone but wont work until the jailbreak process is complete.

The final app I install after a jailbreak is known as winterboard. It's basically a skinning or theme app. Google it and you'll quickly discover that you don't need to be some sort of iClone. You can pretty much change the appearance of everything to suit yourself. There are off the shelf packages that will make loads of changes for you or, once you figure out how it's done, you can make changes yourself. The pic on the right in the ivolution image above is my phone as it presently looks. I downloaded a theme known as iElegance which gave me the background and changed some of my icons to the new look that you see. This theme had a clock and date function that I didn't like it so downloaded another theme called HTC springboard. I copied the files from the second theme and pasted them over the clock files from the first. I then searched google for iElegance type icons. There were loads of them and someone had even made a down loadable zip file so I downloaded this and set about altering my remaining icons. I removed the new folder icons by changing their file extensions and replaced them with new ones that matched my theme. Learning and doing took about three days.

The result shown above is exactly what I wanted. To be clear. If you had just wanted to transform your iPhone to look like an HTC there's a winterboard theme that will do that with weather and calender etc. What I wanted was the appearance of an HTC with the functionality of an iPhone. Thanks to jail breaking, Winterboard, theme developers and the dev-team that's exactly what I've got. If Apple allowed HTC to create an OS for their phone I doubt that it would look to much different. I prefer apples Icons and folders to HTCs menu bars but I prefer the HTC look. I've got it and it works.

In around two weeks there will be another apple update rumoured to be called 4.1. The upgrade will fix an issue with 3g reception. Will I upgrade? Yep. What I have done differently this time is that I have copied folders such as themes and jailbreak apps directly to my computer. My hope is that I can restore my jailbreak fully within 3 hours of an upgrade. If I can then it will be worth it.

Finally, for the most part the jailbreak community are pretty helpful. Loads of how to guides, loads of sites to help you keep up to date. I was surprised therefor with Modmyi.com. I posted three posts there as a newbie and did not get a single response. There was lots of help on the site but I think us newbies with our specific questions may be a bit simpleton for them.

Normal blog to follow and more of the 'iTry' next week.

Cheers
T

Back to reality

Well, that's me back in the real world once again. Today is the last official day of holiday and then it's back to work on Monday.



After joking about the Scottish Weather, apart from a gray Sunday/Monday at the start, the weather was pretty good and, despite my wife's efforts to get me to wear suncream strong enough to protect vampires in daylight, I even have a hint of a tan. It's funny because we've been going up and down to the same region every year for the last seven years and yet we still discovered a forest trail that took us to a bit of deserted beach that we hadn't been to before. (The flies and insects in Forrest particularly loved my suncream and I ended up like that character out of Peanuts, Linus I think, that had a permanent cloud of bugs around their head). Also although we didn't get out fishing quite a few folk did so we had mackerel for tea on several occasions (note to self: look up mackerel recipes online because we're needing to get inventive if we're having it every second or third day). For some reasons the locals in the local town have now decided that we aren't caravaners anymore but are actually locals ourselves. It's very flattering but hopefully it doesn't get too obtrusive as we quite like our privacy. So all in all the holiday did exactly what holidays should do...we relaxed a lot. We stayed for nine days and then had a few days back at home at a slow pace to catch up so all good.

When I got back I checked the blog. The traffic slowed a bit without updates but still gained some visitors from some far flung places. Outside of the UK the USA now sends more visitors than Canada (need to get your friends involved Poet, Hi to Wisconsin, California, Ohio and Florida) with Australia (The Gold Coast has been loyal for a long time but is now joined by Sydney and Adelaide) out in front of the republic of Ireland (think Zoe has lost interest but Peter might still be keeping the side up).
There's also been some welcome but unexpected additions such as Iran, Romania, Singapore and Malaysia to mention just a few. Since I started monitoring in April there have been over 100O hits from 23 separate countries with the average hit spending 4 minutes on the site and viewing 3 pages per visit. OK so some sites get more hits than that per hour but I'm pretty impressed, not to mention grateful, that so many folk have taken an interest in my decisions to; give up smoking, attack a car company and switch to an IPhone.

So, without further ado, what about smoking, the car and the iPhone?

Well I still don't smoke so that's good. I'm not saying when but I did have a drag within the last eight weeks and it damn nearly blew the top of my head off so I think we're officially safe on that front. I don't remember it being anything like that back when I started smoking because, this time, I couldn't even contemplate a second drag. Didn't want to say at the time because I felt guilty but there you go.

I've heard nothing from the car garage. I'm quite surprised because I thought that going via the directors would have got me some response, even if it was just to tell me to shut up. Watch this space though because I will be following it up. I am a member of a forum for my particular brand of car (there is only one major forum for this car). When I got back from holiday I had a 'Friend request' from the forum from someone else in Scotland (my area too). It's only polite to accept such requests, so I did, and then sent him an email detailing exactly what I thought of the dealership. I explained, in reasoned terms, why I wont use the dealer for servicing and even suggested a garage that could do this for him with an average saving of £100 per time. Haven't heard back yet but here's hoping he takes my advice. Through the forum he may befriend other owners and before you know it there shoddy attitude and disgusting policies will be the stuff of Internet legend. I will of course keep you updated on this site but would rather not use this blog to do the actual campaigning.

Bad Apple just a barrel of Laughs

Before I left I also mentioned that Apple were going to address the reception problems of their new iPhone 4. Well they did. They offered every iPhone 4 customer a free Bumper (sort of rubber band that frames the phone) or case (not sure what quality). That's fine I suppose. I would have purchased a case at the same time as the phone anyway because it's a big screen that scratches easily. Despite not ordering a recall they did say that people could take the phone back if they were dissatisfied. In addition to this they issued a software update; IOS 4.01.

Software updates are a pain in the arse for those of us who choose to jailbreak the phone because you have to re-jailbreak and re-install your apps every time it happens. Did this using Redsn0w. Maybe because it wasn't a major upgrade this was easier than last time. It would seem that a major reason for the upgrade was to address the reception issue with the iPhone 4. Apparently it mis-reported reception making it appear that users were getting a better reception than they actually were. To my knowledge this only affected the iPhone 4. After the upgrade however my iPhone 3g shows poorer reception than it previously had. I have to say that this has little or no impact on my ability to make calls it just makes it look like the phone is getting poor reception. If you forget the fact that it works perfectly and gets 3g reception and everything and just go by the bars displayed after the upgrade...It would seem that I'd do better switching back to my HTC touch because it showed more bars. Well done Apple. On the plus side the advertisers have had a field day.
At Motorola, we believe a customer shouldn’t have to dress up their phone for it to work properly. That’s why the DROID X comes with a dual antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like to make crystal clear calls without a bulky phone jacket. For us it’s just one of those things that comes as a given when you’ve been making mobile phones for over 30 years.

Note the reception bars in samsungs 'Hello'

I'll update again before Sunday but that's enough for now

First bites at the apple.

So what's on my iPhone and why is it any better than any other phone?

Unlike most phones you have to do a bit of prep before your iPhone arrives. Why? Well it doesn't work without itunes. It's that simple. No iTunes no iPhone. As a windows user I had never had any need for iTunes. I therefor installed the minimum that I could and said 'no' to any prompts that asked if I wanted it to be a default player etc. I then set up an iStore account. I had no plans to purchase anything but never the less had to set up an account and supply bank details. iTunes then created a complete copy of all my music files (lucky I wasn't short of memory because it didn't ask, or warn me that this would happen). It wanted to copy all the pictures from my PC as well. And all the movies. I stopped it and limited what files it could access. Less attention to detail here could have caused all sorts of PC conflicts and problems.

The next thing I wanted to do before the phone arrived was sort out some satnav software. My last two phones had this and I strongly recommend it. Now, previously, I had acquired this software without paying. With Iphone I'd heard this might not work. A quick Internet search however explained to me that, I could have the software but, I would have to 'jailbreak' my phone first. Further searches told me that jail breaking would invalidate the warranty and that the phone would crash constantly. That and the fact that every software upgrade would undo the jailbreak. Hardly worthwhile then?

My new phone was jail broken within 12 hours of arrival. By 13 hours it had satnav and it worked. By 24 hours all that worked was the satnav and I'd lost my phone provider, wifi, etc. Maybe jail breaking didn't work. Restored the phone to default. Tried again. Hey presto! Almost two months now and no issues. Satnav works a treat.

Since my previous phones did SatNav I'm not going to rave about that although the rotating screen and large display are fantastic. Also my download is a later version than I had previously.

Apps:


Well being a true Scot I went for a look at some free stuff first. Two of my most used apps came from this initial start. Metro.co.uk a daily free British newspaper and STV news, a Scottish Television news application. Metro can also do a download if you're struggling for Internet. STV has all the headlines and provided you get 3g coverage can show bulletins at the same time.

My next fave is actually a website so you need to favorite it with safari. iphone.tvcatchup.com For users in the UK this should be essential. Basically all the digital free view channels live. What's more it actually manages to stream live TV with almost no Internet signal. The only time it's let me down so far has been the world cup. Not sure if it's the broadband signal or if the site gets over subscribed but otherwise it's excellent.

Then comes Stanza. An e-book reader with loads of free books. As a gadget lover I've always wondered if the Sony or amazon book readers were anything more than a gimmick. When I saw that this was free I thought I'd try it to see how it worked. Bloody hell! The sepia background, font, font size and spacing actually make it, not only possible but, pleasant to read on the small screen. Within the software there are links to download books direct to the phone or you can download them to your PC and use something like Box net to load them to your iPhone.

Box.net This I discovered because of Stanza above but it's important in it's own right. It's one of the ever popular 'cloud' services that let you save files from your PC to a web space, and download them to your phone or another PC from that space. Added to the mix it can read word, excel and pdf files on your iPhone.

AppBox Pro. Dubiously enough the only application I have paid for yet you can get it free. I discovered that some of the so called free apps come with loads of advertising so decided that 50 pence was a worthwhile investment to avoid the ads. This is just a collection of useful gizmo's that use the iPhone interface. Some like the day calculator, and unit converter are just a spreadsheet function created for you, others use updates when your phone is in wifi to get up to date info such as currencies. It's got a ruler, a spirit level, a torch (turns your screen bright white), it even has translation software. Available free or for the 50p premium without ads.

Yell.com. Just the yellow pages website but laid out in a way that suits the iPhone. Combine this with Google Earth/google maps and you've got a pretty powerful tool that will find your GPS location, find businesses near that location and even phone any of the numbers it finds with one touch rather than having to copy them down. It's actually like the adverts for the Iphone promise.

Wordweb and wikipanion provide an on/offline dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopedia and, importantly for me, use UK spelling.

The trainline.com is another online service that's been optimized to work well with iPhone. When you switch it on it can use your GPS location to find the nearest train station or you can manually enter details of the journey that you want to make.

I'm also using something called Fliq Notes. A nice straightforward software for keeping and categorising notes.

Nightstand is an alarm clock function which you probably don't need but which uses the HTC flip clock that my last phone had. It's free so why not.

Cinema Times (UK). The wife loves this and it works very well. For some reason they also do cinema times England, Wales, Scotland but just download the UK version. Set your fave cinema and it will get the latest listings from the net. Cool

I also have stopwatch and that mad program that can name any song, Shazam, as well as a version of spider solitaire. With the exception of the satnav and the 50p I paid for the premium version of AppBox all of the above were free.

In addition to this I have over 500 music files and forty or so photos. That and some paid for apps that I wont mention because I haven't paid for them. Try apptrakr.org if you want to know more.

A lot of these apps work using the Internet and/or the GPS. It's fair to say though that they download when the Internet is available but will still work when it isn't. The dictionary, book reader, newspaper etc can all work perfectly without a connection.

My old HTC touch could have done almost all of the above. It just didn't. The programs weren't in your face or as easy to access so you didn't find them. I believe that android is working to reverse this trend but, until then, it's an apple a day for me.

Getting Mobile

OK, We're about three or four weeks in now and I've had a good chance to thoroughly evaluate the iPhone.It will probably take a few articles to get all my ideas down but, to start with, lets look at how I came to own an IPhone.

I could have switched to the IPhone two years ago but didn't want to. Why? Well I just don't like Apple to be honest. The world seems to work perfectly well without Apple. Windows PCs do everything that you need a PC to do whilst apple PCs are bit funny about doing anything unless you want to do it the way Apple prescribe. For a while it was almost trendy to slag off windows but I stuck by them. Bill Gates et al were the ones who realised that computers needed to be simplified or they'd never catch on.


At school, 1 million years BC, or so it seems now, I actually remember that we were allowed to pick computing as an extra subject. (At this time you weren't allowed a calculator in maths.) This extra subject was something that you weren't sitting a certificate in but that gave you a break from your studies and made you a more rounded person. My mum had purchased a Sinclair ZX81 and I was interested in finding out how to get it to play space invaders. For three one hour classes at school I relentlessly plugged code in to a BBC micro. I had no real understanding of the code but, words can't describe, how rewarding it was at the end of three weeks to hit the enter key and have a circle appear on screen. My code had plotted that circle. It's easy to see why, at that point, the computer hadn't comfortably invaded the home.

During the late 80s and early 90s my job was as a retail manager. The PC was just about to change this world forever. It started with a barcode scanner and then, before you could blink, we had EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale). The till was recording what was in stock, what had been sold and what needed ordered. Managers with up to thirty years experience walked away from perfectly good jobs to join company's that hadn't yet invested in EPOS. They were payed to manage shops not as bloody scientists.

It was late into the decade (1998) before I was persuaded to part with over £1000 on a PC with the Just released windows 95 and office 97 (I think). A heavenly three gb memory and a massively limited and expensive subscription to dial up Internet. I was way ahead of most who, liked the idea, but had far more important ways to waste their money. 12 years later I can't think of anyone who doesn't own a PC or, at very least, a mobile that would put that first PC to shame.

For me I entered the mobile world quite late. Despite spearheading computers I was a bit reluctant about the whole mobile phone thing. I loved the gadget end of things but I didn't want people to be able to get hold of me whenever they wanted. (I'm still a bit like that now). I love text and am amazed with what phones can do but I'm not in love with being available.


The first phone came around 2000 and was an Erickson. Not a Sony Erickson but an Erickson. They hadn't got together yet. This mobile consisted mostly of a battery and could phone and text. The only really advanced thing was that it allowed you to write your own ring tone. I believe I'm the only one that ever did. (Jean Michelle Jarres' oxygen never sounded so good). The next few phones only came about because the phone companies were giving away great mobiles to get you to switch networks. The phones themselves just got smaller and smarter. Flip phones, slide phones etc.


Then it happened. When everyone else in the world went for the small and slim Motorola razor I went for the Sony Erickson smart phone of the time. Cant remember the exact model but this bad boy was the first of the true smart phones. Hewlett Packard were doing something pretty impressive with their PDA and windows and some new upstart, blackberry, were pushing emails but the Sony, using the symbian operating system, had advantages over them all. About the size of a cigarette packet it had a stylus to allow you to write texts. It had a working pocket version of MS Office (my iPhone still doesn't do this well). Using blue tooth, a GPS receiver and a dodgy version of tom tom I was the first person I knew to have satnav on my phone although Nokias were just about to do that bit better.

The funny thing was that people liked my phone but didn't love it. Even Sony Erickson seemed to spend more of their R&D dollars on creating a good MP3 player and camera phone than on exploring the true smart phone market. Most liked my phone but thought it was too big. When Nokia pulled out the N95 it seemed like history for my phone. Talking of good MP3 players...Apple were bringing out a phone.


When I was due for a new handset I was quite excited. Symbian was, and is, good but I'd found a handset with Windows. Windows had to be the way to go. Truly sync with your pc. Again a stylus but this time the writing recognition had improved to a point where you really could almost write natively. Some folk had gone for the newly released IPhone but what did they know. My HTC didn't even need a separate GPS receiver because this one was built in. I could surf the Internet and connect to wifi automatically I could tell you the weather or access google maps. The only downside was that my package didn't give me free Internet. We're only going back three years but most mobiles charged a ridiculous amount for the Internet and access was painfully slow. The HTC also had pocket office and could hold my MP3 library so why did I go for the iPhone?.....

Stay hooked to find out.

T

Would you Adam & Eve it-I've taken the Apple

For the international readers, 'Adam and Eve it' is what's known as Cockney rhyming slang for 'Believe it', i.e. 'Would you believe it-I've taken the Apple'. Phew glad that's out of the way. Here in the UK we have some funny customs that seem normal till you try to explain them.

Anyway what the hell am I on about? Well I'm not on about smoking because I don't do that now. What I am on about is mobile phones. Yep some folk are quite happy with phones that can make phone calls and possibly send and receive texts. Add on a camera and it's enough to make some folk faint.

Me!!! Well I always wanted more. I bought a PC when they were expensive and no-one could understand what you would do with it. I had a calculator in Primary school. That was long enough ago that most of the other kids parents didn't have one and hadn't seen one. Lucky this isn't a dating site because I don't think I'm really selling myself here. The point is I always wanted gadgets. I didn't necessarily know what they did or why but I wanted them. When I was watching space 1999 I wasn't enthralled by the whole 'other worldliness of it all'. I wanted to know what the machine with all the lights and dials did. I would have bought a toaster if it had a graphic equaliser or decent digital display. So when it came to phones I always had the cutting edge one.

I fell for the ultra mobiles hook line and sinker. I even stuck with it and learned how to text using a stylus and a version of my own hand writing. Even the true geeks gave up on that but I didn't. BUT, I never got the whole Apple vibe. My samsung MP3 player had a 20gb hard drive before your computer had a 20gb hard drive. What's more I could download what I wanted and not be stuck with Itunes. My computer could sync with anything and if I wanted software (not from shops if you know what I mean) I only had to persevere and I'd get it. I once boasted that 'the only legal piece of software on my pc was the software I used to download illegal software'.

But now I've given in. My HTC was a damned fine phone in millions of ways and I actually wanted it to be better than an I phone. I wanted windows mobile to out do apple. The phone was capable of it. I even think windows might have won but then android and symbian make the non Ipod market to diluted so developers can't concentrate on one thing. So now I have an apple Iphone.

If you get one, be prepared. This doesn't work straight out of the box. You NEED to have Itunes on your PC and an Istore account (with your bank details loaded) or you can't even switch it on (you could but there'd be no point). Remind yourself how to 'Pair' your wifi with your broadband because you'll want to do that. Figure out how to copy all your contacts because you need a new Sim card. Make sure you have a free usb port on your pc because they don't like extension cables or external USB ports. I took a morning off to wait for the delivery. Then I ended up getting it from the depot the night before. It took all that night and my morning off to get the damn thing up to speed.

That said...It's pretty bloody good once you get it figured out. Oh and there are some naughty people who've cracked a way of installing stuff without going through Itunes. I could grow to like this.

I wonder if there's an app that could stop you smoking?

Speak later

T