iPhone locked to AT&T forever?

Now that the iPhone is about to celebrate its 2nd birthday, what’s gonna happen to all of the original iPhone buyers (like me)?

Here’s my point…

Most of the people that bought the 1st iPhone on June 30, 2007 and agreed to the 2-year AT&T contract will now be at the end of this term – which means (presumably) that AT&T could unlock the phones from the AT&T network at the customer’s request – AND – said customer should be allowed to go with whatever pay-as-you-go/sim-card solution they prefer (obviously, minus the visual voicemail features).

Wouldn’t this be a correct assumption?

Because if the “coulds” and “shoulds” mentioned above are not true, and this option is not going to be available, then the 2-yr. AT&T contract is really a LIFETIME contract. (One they really didn’t tell you about two years ago.)

I can’t believe there aren’t more articles like this one cropping up with WWDC being only a week away and the 2-year anniversary of iPhone four weeks away.

This is an issue that Apple and AT&T need to address. Some people would like to have their freedom with a “legitimately” unlocked iPhone (vs. jailbreaking). After all, we early adopters did pay $500 to $600 for our phones – very similar to the the high price tag iPhones fetch in countries that sell unlocked versions.

If anyone knows something I don’t know, sound off in the comments below…

May 31, 2009 | Filed Under Culture, iPhone, Opinion | Leave a Comment

View Source on iPhone

This is a cool little tidbit for those of you web developers that have an iPhone. A Safari bookmarklet that enables you to “View Source” for any web page while using Safari on the iPhone. A bookmarklet (in case you didn’t know) is “a JavaScript program stored as a URL within a bookmark” as defined by Wikipedia.

The steps that follow will walk you through the process…

1 – Select and “copy” the long string of code below…

* This needs to be one long continuous string, so if you’re cutting and pasting from Firefox, you’ll need to remove the line breaks and/or spaces.

2 – On your computer, go to ANY webpage in Safari and bookmark it using either the “+” (Add Bookmark) button or by choosing “Add Bookmark…” from the “Bookmarks” menu. When saving the bookmark name it “View Source” and save it wherever you’d like in your bookmark hierarchy.

3 – Now, go into the bookmark manager. Do this by clicking the bookmark icon in your bookmarks bar or by choosing “Show All Bookmarks” from the “Bookmarks” menu. Navigate to the bookmark you just saved.

4 – Single-click on the URL for the bookmark to highlight the text for editing, and paste the text/code you just copied above.

5 – Plug in your iPhone and sync it up w/ your bookmarks on your computer.

Now, to actually use it – launch your Safari web browser on your iPhone and navigate to whatever web page you would like to view the source code for. After the page has loaded, click the bookmark icon in the lower Safari navigation bar (3rd from the left), and navigate to your “View Source” bookmark and click it.

And there you have it.

November 27, 2007 | Filed Under Browsers, iPhone, JavaScript | 5 Comments