Breaking Open An iPhone! What’s Inside and the Costs

So…now that you have your pretty little iPhone, wonder what the inside of it looks like?!  Here are some pictures of what the innards of the iPhone look like:

Breaking the iPhone Open:
  The $27 touchscreen module that enables the iPhone’s cool touch navigation originates from Balda and TPK Solutions.

This closeup shows the bottom of the iPhone’s applications circuit board. The open slot (1) houses the AT&T SIM card; the iPhone not only is locked to AT&T service, but it’s also locked to the specific AT&T SIM card that comes with it. We tried inserting a non-iPhone AT&T SIM card–and the phone wouldn’t recognize it. Hidden under (2) is 8MB of multipurpose flash memory–which is in addition to the iPhone’s 4GB or 8GB of primary flash storage.

The heart and soul of the iPhone…Pictured here: The quad-band GSM (850-, 900-, 1800-, and 1900-MHz)/EDGE transceiver (A); power amplifier (B); Bluetooth 2.0 chip set (C); the wireless 802.11 a/b/g chip set (D); the baseband chip set (E); and power management chip set (F).

Britain’s Got Talent – Six Year Old Connie WOW’s the Judges!!

Video: Connie Talbot, a six year old from England singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow on the TV show “Britain’s Got Talent”.  Great voice and an even better smile!  My votes for her!!

UPDATE: Connie at the semi-finals and a brief interview with her.  I love this girl! She can really sing.

 

UPDATE 2 – Connie made it to the finals!! Go Connie!!  Here’s her performance at the Finals…

Mika Snaps Again About Reporting on Paris Hilton

Video: Mika Brzenzki of MSNBC snaps again a second time in the broadcast on live TV about reporting on Paris Hilton.  This time, the story winds up going into the shredder.

Click here to watch the video.

MSNBC Reporter Refuses to Report on Paris Hilton on Live TV

MSNBC’s Mika Brzeznski refuses to report on a story about Paris Hilton on Live TV.  She whips out her lighter and is about to burn the story but gets her lighter snatched away by a another anchor.  But she still shreds the story and comments on why Paris Hilton is not news worthy.  Classic!

Click here to watch the video.

iPhone Magic

Cool vid of a guy performing “street magic” with his iPhone!

 

Unlocked iPhone’s Coming In About a Week

In the midst of the whole iPhone release and launch, one question that kept coming up was how long will it be before someone can actually unlock the iPhone to work with other carriers? The iPhone’s OS passwords have already been cracked, and the encrypted restore image which contains the machine’s instructions to run has already been found. 

An unlocked iPhone will spoil the deal that AT&T has with Apple in being the sole service provider for the iPhone’s for the next 5 years… July 2012 in the US. 

Hacker: Unlocked iPhones Coming in One Week or Less

Hackers have already succeeded in cracking the iPhone’s activation process, a step towards unlocking the iPhone.

Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service

Hackers may successfully unlock an iPhone in as soon as three to seven days, according to a representative of one effort that aims to unlock Apple Inc.’s new handset.

“We believe it will be easy. We are privately aware many of the iPhone engineers came from other handset manufacturers, and we understand their design techniques fairly well,” said gj, speaking in an interview conducted using IRC (Internet Relay Chat). He requested that his real name not be used.

“Easy to us means inside one week,” he said, offering an estimate of three to seven days.

Unlocking the iPhone means users will be able to use the handset with other service providers, not just AT&T Inc., which has an exclusive deal to sell the phone in the U.S.

By Tuesday night, U.S. time, hackers succeeded in cracking the iPhone’s activation process, a minor step towards unlocking the iPhone but a significant technical challenge.

The activation process uses a software token that is sent from the phone via iTunes to Apple, which signs the token and returns it to the phone. When that process is completed, iTunes tells the phone to activate.

Hackers developed tools for both Windows and MacOS that allow users to activate their phones without iTunes. But users will have to use a token from an activated iPhone, which can be used to activate multiple phones. The hackers are not providing a token with the tools.

“If you don’t have a known token (which does contain identifying information) you won’t be able to use the tool,” gj said.

At least one other hacker found a way to activate the iPhone without using iTunes. Jon Lech Johansen — better known as DVD Jon, a hacker who helped develop the DeCSS tool for decrypting DVDs — released a tool that can activate the iPhone without iTunes on his blog.

“The iPhone does not have phone capability, but the iPod and Wi-Fi work,” Johansen wrote.

Cracking the activation process brings hackers one step closer to their goal of unlocking the iPhone. The phone requires iTunes to activate functions such as its camera and music player. But the process also requires signing up for a two-year data plan with AT&T.

“Activating the phone really just makes the device more ‘usable’ for those who want to use it as a Wi-Fi device, for instance,” gj said.

With the activation process cracked hackers turned their focus to unlocking the iPhone, a challenge that is expected to be easier than cracking the activation process.

“Unlocking is a function of the radio and the radio’s interaction with the SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) logic, and these are mostly standards based,” gj said.

A rumored software update for the iPhone, expected to be released on July 5, could undo some of the progress hackers made towards unlocking the phone. “If Apple releases an update on July 5th that includes ‘fixes’ for our efforts so far, it will be a setback,” gj said. “I don’t know if it will be a permanent one.”

Hackers working together to unlock the iPhone don’t belong to a specific group, and don’t plan to claim credit for their work, gj said. “We just want to see the hardware freed. We accept that others will exploit those works but hopefully it will be a lesson to Apple,” he said.

“They’re such a great company, it’s a real shame for them to lock everything down like this. The design is top notch,” he said. “They would win far more business by setting an example for the industry.”