Craig Moffet on AT&T’s negative press concerning the lack of MMS and tethering feature support so far:
Apple has radically tilted the strategic playing field away from the network operator in favor of the device manufacturer. Remarkably, Apple has so thoroughly stolen the customer relationship – who would argue that Apple iPhone customers’ first affinity is to the device rather than to the network – that the network is not only irrelevant, it is rather a source of derision.
I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone who actually switched to AT&T because their service or rate plans were actually a draw from another carrier. You expect the service to be about the same across any carrier and you make your choice based on either a rate plan or a device you want. I’m one of the people who switched to AT&T solely for the iPhone when the 3G came out. There was never anything about AT&T that made me want to use them and I was perfectly content using an unlocked device on T-Mobile until there was actually a limitation on speed because of my carrier.
Kudos to Apple to actually pushing out a phone that tries to make AT&T improve their network and feature set on a reasonable schedule. As it is, we’re still well behind the rest of the world.
Via Tech Trader Daily.
So earlier today I posted about creating a profile file, but here’s what it actually looks like to the end user. I exported mine to a file and then emailed it to myself. Check out the stellar service AT&T was providing me with at the time.
The email with attachment.
Clicking the attachment brings up this screen. Notice I didn’t sign my profile with a certificate.
Clicking the More Details button gives me, well, more details.
And to reinforce the fact that I didn’t sign my cert (or that it can’t be validated up to a trusted root certificate) the iPhone issues me this warning.
And because I’m like anyone else I just press Install Now and continue on. A few seconds later the Wi-Fi icon popped up on my phone and I could see I had been connected to the network provided in the profile. All is groovy.
My last post was really more of a lead in to this one. As I was putzing around with the configuration utility I was surprised that the Wi-Fi tab doesn’t allow you to actually enter a password for a WEP or WPA/WPA2 network, which is arguably the most useful part of being able to provision a profile for wireless settings.
What I found was that although there is no password field in the GUI you can still include it with the profile by manually editing the file. The profile file that gets created is nothing more than an XML file so open it up with your favorite editor (I used Wordpad because Notepad had a tough time with the line breaks). Now somewhere between the <dict> and </dict> tags that contain the PayloadContent you need to add two more nodes:
<key>Password</key>
<string>(your wireless key)</string>
I added mine directly below the SSID_STR key and string for the wireless network name. If you have multiple Wi-Fi networks you’ll see a separate <dict></dict> structure for each so just make sure you put the passwords in the right spot. Now just save the file and either email or post it on a website for users to download. All they’ll need to is click install to have the Wi-Fi network automatically added to their phone.
So now that the JesusPhone iPhone has been deemed Enterprise worthy around the world with its Exchange support businesses are jumping at the opportunity to move employees on to the platform. Or should I flip that around to say employees are breathing down the neck of IT departments so they can finally get an iPhone? Either way works.
Apple has actually provided a configuration utility named, oddly enough, the iPhone Configuration (Web – if you use the web version) Utility that you can download for free. There is a native application for OS X and a web-based one for Windows or OS X systems. As far as I can tell, they all have the same feature set. Here’s a quick little tour…
The main screen resembles the iTunes interface for syncing iPods and iPhones. You can also sign your profiles with a certificate, otherwise they’ll appear to be from an untrusted source to the end-user.
The passcode page lets you configure some lockout and pin policies.
Wi-Fi lets you configure wireless network profiles. It’s actually extremely flexible in how much you can configure.
The VPN page lets you configure either PPTP, L2TP or an IPSec Cisco VPN connection.
The Email tab will allow configuration of an IMAP or POP account.
The Exchange tab lets you configure a few settings to bypass any Autodiscover lookup.
The credentials tab lets you import certificates on to the iPhone. You can add a self-signed certificate here (hello SBS users!) to import on the device. You could alternatively point the user at a web address with the certificate file and mobile Safari would prompt them to install the certificate.
Lastly, you can set up the APN address, username and password if you’re really ambitious. I’d suggest leaving this setting alone.
iPhone 2.0 supports playback of WAV voicemail – Via TUAW.
This is awesome because it means if your Exchange mailbox is UM-enabled you can get your work voicemails on your phone. That is assuming your Exchange admin has enabled GSM or G.711 encoding for your voicemails. If not, hand them this command:
Set-UMMailbox "paul" -CallAnsweringAudioCodec gsm
http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/05/mac-os-x-1053-sync-google-contacts.html
Very nice addition. Now I can actually keep my iPhone and Google contacts in sync.
Since the iPhone “revirginizer” tool was released today I went about the task of finally upgrading my unlocked 1.0.2 iPhone to the latest firmware. It definitely took a little longer than last time, but it all came out just fine at the end again. I had unlocked my iPhone originally using the iUnlock application and the guide from ModMyiPhone.com.
I haven’t seen a guide that’s quite as easy to follow for the 1.1.1 release, but if you follow the 3 links below in order you should be able to upgrade, activate and unlock the phone again.
- Revirginize your phone with these instructions
- Activate the 1.0.2 firmware, update to 1.1.1 and activate the 1.1.1 firmware using Independence
- Copy anySIM 1.1 to your phone and run to unlock
