Originally posted on the “Cristiano on Tech/Life” blog

Obviously I didn’t get a contract with my brand new iPhone, simply because I don’t have the budget to spend £35 a month on a contract. Maybe in the future I will buy a contract anyway, but for now I am basically stuck with my expensive Dutch contract. In other words: I had to hack my iPhone. With doing this I ran into some issues, which I will try to highlight in the following article, giving some reference for all you other people that are thinking of buying a UK iPhone.

Defining “UK iPhone”

Let’s start by quickly explaining what I mean with the “UK iPhone”. This is kind of important as there are different iPhones out there. With the UK iPhone I mean the iPhone that is currently (January 1st, 2008) sold in the UK that ships with the 1.1.2 firmware (see here to learn how to check firmware you have). iPhones shipped with this firmware Out Of the Box (commonly called OOB or OTB) ship with a new bootloader/baseband. This new bootloader has some repercussions that I will get to later.

Everything I will tell in this article might also hold for the US, German, or French 1.1.2 OOB phones, but I don’t know for sure because I don’t have these phones.

(more…)

I went to the Apple Store in Regent Street today to get a free Leopard t-shirt. I was a bit early and noticed a line was forming so got a spot as 9th in line at about 3:30PM. Eventually hundreds of people got in line behind me and Melinda (and a few people even were arrogant enough to get in line in front of us, assholes!). At 6 the doors opened and I had to push some queue jumpers who were told a couple of times by us and Apple employees to *** off.

Strange thing is that, although we only went for the t-shirt (first 500 would get one), we eventually ended up buying a family license as we have 3 macs anyway. Most of the photos can be found below or on my flickr page.

PS: We got applauded at which felt really weird and cool at the same time.

It has been a while since we had some regular posts here on FourStarters. The main reasons being the holiday season, which obviously also affects us. Starting today I am planning to bring FourStarters back to speed with some interesting posts about startups, webapps, and any other software.

Next up we also plan to attend a few conferences in the next few weeks, starting with dConstruct and BarCampBrighton this week. Alper and Sjors start of by going to the dConstruct conference this week in Brighton (UK) after which they will join Melinda, Reinier and me at BarCampBrighton during the weekend.

We are hoping that Alper and Sjors are able to give us some live feedback from the dConstruct conference, including some nice photos. Highlights of the conference will be the workshops on Microformats, Experience Design, and more. I haven’t got word from Alper or Sjors yet on what workshops they were going to attend, but I guess it must be something interesting.

Although BarCampBrighton will be the first BarCamp in Brighton ever, it will definitely be a strange one with 5% of the attendees being Dutch. There were only 100 tickets available for this small and local BarCamp, so this way it is going to be an interesting experience for both us and the other people at the conference. At least with this amount of people it can’t be hard to have some live reports from the conferences.

We are hoping to see you all soon at any of the conferences.