Hasta La Gadget!

Looking for a jailbreak for your iPod touch or iPhone running iOS 4.1? Your chariot is named limera1n — assuming you’re willing to risk your device on a software developer showdown. The infamous Geohot just upstaged the iPhone Dev Team and Chronic Dev Team by releasing a reportedly buggy beta exploit of his own, which you can find at our download link immediately below. It only works on Windows at the moment, hacks only official releases and iPhone 3GS isn’t supported right now, and it claims to be an unpatchable, untethered release for those of you who appreciate what those terms mean.

As you can imagine, rival developers aren’t terribly happy that Geohot’s back in the limelight. MuscleNerd (of the iPhone Dev Team) claims that limera1n will re-lock iPhones that were unlocked by his team’s ultrasn0w software, and recommends you skip limera1n, but the main reason the iOS hacking community is angry at Geohot is because if more than one exploit is released simultaneously, Apple can fix them both in one fell swoop. By releasing first, Geohot has allegedly forced other teams to decide between the good of iPhone users over the short term (by releasing a different, more stable exploit) or over the long term (by saving their exploit for future use) and so far it looks like both teams have chosen to prolong the fight — the iPhone Dev Team is asking folks to withhold its Shatter exploit, and Chronic Dev Team says it will modify its greenpois0n jailbreak to use Geohot’s hack instead. What a weird, wild world we live in.

Update: How might this work on an iPad, given that beta versions of iOS (like 4.2) aren’t currently supported? Good question. We’ve struck all references to iPad accordingly, until the powers that be figure it out.

Update 2: Video after the break! Also, we’re hearing that some folks have jailbroken their iPads successfully with limera1n, and we personally got it working quickly on a pair of iPhones with iOS 4.1… but one of the two was missing icons upon restart and didn’t regain App Store, Maps, Game Center and Calendar even after a restore. Be careful, now!

Sam Sheffer contributed to this report.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Limera1n jailbreaks the iPhone and iPod touch running iOS 4.1, angers dev community and neuters one of our phones (video)

Limera1n jailbreaks the iPhone and iPod touch running iOS 4.1, angers dev community and neuters one of our phones (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 09 Oct 2010 18:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Clearly a lot of folks out there are pretty passionate about the quality of their cameraphone pics. So too is cellphone modder hyperX, who is developing some custom tweaks to improve the quality of the stills and vids coming out of Nokia‘s latest darling. First is a hack to enable 720p30 video, a slight improvement over the 720p25 default. That’s demonstrated after the break, along with a continuous autofocus mod. More notable, however, is a tweak to enable nearly uncompressed images. Stock JPEGs coming from the camera clock in around 2MB, but the example image he’s provided (on the other end of that source link) is a rather heftier 11MB — truly a hack that won’t do your memory card any favors, but it’ll sure make those pixels shine. Sadly without back-to-back before and after images we can’t say for sure what kind of tangible improvement this makes, but we hear if you ask nicely he’ll let you try it out for yourself.

Continue reading Hack improves Nokia N8’s image and video quality, puts a hurting on your memory card (video)

Hack improves Nokia N8’s image and video quality, puts a hurting on your memory card (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Now that jailbreaking is totally on the up and up, thanks to a recent ruling by the U.S. Copyright Office, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that users are able to unlock new hardware within a matter of hours.

Take the new Apple TV. The thing just started shipping–in fact, it’s not even shipping widely yet, but it’s already been jailbroken, thanks to pod2g’s SHAtter tool.

So, why jailbreak an Apple TV? Well, aside from the obvious reason (i.e. it’s fun to jailbreak stuff), the latest version of Apple’s settop box is running a neutered version of iOS that won’t let the user run any apps on the thing, and let’s be honest, as smooth as iOS is, the operating system is nothing without its apps.

Granted, as Daily Tech points out, the new Apple TV isn’t a device designed for storage. There’s a mere 8GB of flash space on the thing, all of which is designed for caching all of those movies you rent with the thing. That doesn’t leave a ton of space for apps.

Chalk this up to doing something because you can–at least until some clever hacking figures out a more useful application for the device.

It sure didn’t take long for the dev community to hack into Apple TV’s iOS build. One of the first payouts is a port of Apple TV’s “lowtide” 10-foot user interface to an iPod touch as briefly demonstrated in the first video after the break. While not very useful on such a small display, that could change when ported to the iPad’s bigger 10-inch display. In fact, that might be Apple’s plan according to our friend Erica Sadun who’s been busily spelunking the Apple TV’s disk image. She posits that the iPad could launch the lowtide UI when responding to AirPlay requests in a future iOS build.

Another minor victory was achieved by TUAW reader Arix who spliced the Apple TV’s AirPlay daemon onto a jailbroken iPhone 3GS thus allowing it to receive AirPlay streams (second video). But the best news of all, perhaps, is the ability to restore the Apple TV in iTunes by connecting its micro-USB port to your computer. That means that existing PC- and Mac-based jailbreak tools can be updated to work over the connection. In fact, TinyUmbrella has already been updated to backup the Apple TV’s SHSH blobs in order to preserve your ability to downgrade in the future. With 8GB of storage and 256MB of RAM to play with, we suspect this little media puck will become quite the developer playground, with or without Apple’s consent.

Continue reading Apple TV restores in iTunes via micro-USB, UI hacked onto iPod touch (video)

Apple TV restores in iTunes via micro-USB, UI hacked onto iPod touch (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 07:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The iPod nano iWatch? That’s so last week. Apple’s sixth-gen PMP has found a far better home in one fellow’s old Dreamcast VMU (Visual Memory Unit). It takes a bit of work to get the 1.5-inch screen and headphone outlet aligned just right, but when it’s all said and done, you get one of the best and quickest homages to old school gaming around. And hey, it also acts as a big plastic fortress to protect your touchy music player. Video after the break.

Continue reading iPod nano modded into Dreamcast VMU, magic meets nostalgia (video)

iPod nano modded into Dreamcast VMU, magic meets nostalgia (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Sep 2010 09:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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