A while ago I wrote a quick post about why I wasn’t so sure about getting the new 3G iPhone here in Canada, as I have been using a hacked 2G US model for some time and all I was really missing was a data plan. Well lots has changed since the last post…
Rogers caved-in to some degree and are now offering iPhones on your old plan available at the subsidized pricing but you have to renew with a three year contract, I have even heard that some people are able to get iPhones at the $199 and $299 pricing without even getting a data plan (?) Rogers has also introduced a limited time offer 6GB for $30 per month data plan available for most Smart Phones including the iPhone.
So what does that mean to me? I’m sticking with my old 2G iPhone and grabbing the new 6GB data plan! Ya I know I won’t have the built in GPS (I already have a great turn by turn Magellan GPS in the car). And ya I know I’ll be waiting for my web pages to load up with my slow Edge based data connection. The truth is I really am not using my data as much as I thought I would, in the past 20 days I have only used just over 20MB of data. Part of this is because I was in California for four days doing the Mac Video Training Tour. I guess I must do the bulk of my iPhone browsing from home based WiFi.
What I was really after was the new iPhone 2.0 software with the MobileMe push technology and of course the iTunes App Store. And then along came the iPhone Dev Team to the rescue. Here’s how to Jailbreak an iPhone running the 2.0 software (though that tutorial is specific to the iPod Touch, it’s nearly identical for the iPhone).
Next came the iTunes App store, you can kill a lot of time in there! There are some great Applications, I even ended up spending about $25 in all on paid applications and got a bunch of really good free ones. Compared to the the 3rd party Installer applications I had used in the past on my hacked 1.1.4 iPhone, the iTunes App Store applications are much more solid, way less hit and miss in my opinion.
All my email, calendar and contact data went over just fine but I quickly noticed that my MobileMe syncing was only happening when I actually docked my iPhone just like using a non 2.0 version, after much trial and error (it didn’t help that the MobileMe email server was down on the day I tried to set this all up), I found out that setting up MobileMe on an iPhone has to be done by actually going into the iPhone email settings and adding a MobileMe email account manually.
You can’t select an already setup MobileMe account in iTunes and just sync it. Once the new MobileMe account is added on your iPhone, it will wipe all the iTunes synced data present in your iPhone and start pushing it back to your iPhone. This process was very different to the way I was used to and it threw me for a loop! All is good now and I am “pushing” my way along nicely.
If you have an older 2G iPhone this might be worth doing if you have some computer skills but I think most people will be better off getting a new 3G iPhone.
This post was originally authored by Mike Kaye
