I found a thread on the Vodafone UK eForum today discussing jailbreaking. The usual mis-information was contained (posted by members of the public) with a couple of Vodafone representatives providing information about handset warranty and insurance cover when jailbroken. I decided to add to the discussion and made the following post

I’ve lost count of all the mobile handsets I have owned over the years; however I can tell you the names of all the manufacturers with relative ease, they are, “No brand name, Nokia, and Apple”. The generic / no brand name handset was the first handset I ever owned and looked like a pencil case. It was on the Vodafone network in 1995 at a time when a monthly line rental would set you back £50 and for that sum you’d get no provision other than the ability to make and receive calls. For every call you made, you’d pay £1 per minute on peak and 75p per minute off peak. Until April 2009, all the other handsets I owned were made by Nokia – it was at this point I moved to the Apple iPhone and I haven’t looked back since.

I’ve always been excited by technology and when the T5 came out from Palm, I could hardly wait to get one. But, as with most technology, the *novelty* wore off. I played a few games, set up a few calendars, and got bored after a few months. Bored of the difficulty entering text. Bored of putting in a wifi card that I had to carry around if I wanted connectivity. Bored of finding a contact but not being able to phone them without finding a phone first. Bored with how big it was. Bored with how hard it was to turn off.

SkyPE has been around for a number of years. I’ve been a user of their services for many of these. Initially using their SkyPE to SkyPE services and later a number of other products. Early adoption meant I had to endure low quality calls and often laggy services. After a while you might get used to having to work out when was a good point to start speaking due to delays; however I’m pleased to say that these issues have pretty much been ironed out. All told, this post isn’t to detail all of the different services available from SkyPE, nor is it a sales pitch or recommendation for them – it’s simply a “how to” guide for how to save money and make SkyPE calls (on your iPhone) using 3G services when no wireless network is available.

Cryptic have created a far from perfect MMORPG at the open beta stage, however this can be said of many previous MMORPGs such as WoW which also had its fair share of teething problems some of which are still being addressed 5 years after launch. As long as Cryptic address major issues such as lag & quirky bugs I’m quietly confident STO will enjoy a long & prosperous lifespan.

I saw the below image (and an associated article over at Gizmodo), and was so impressed with the satellite image that I wanted to keep a copy for myself here on the about here blog (being a British citizen). It’s of the UK completely frozen from top to bottom – we’re having the worst winter for over 100 years (in my region) and on the whole (for the UK) this is the worst snow fall since around 1963.

Whether you’ve literally just got an iPhone 3G or 3GS or even if you’ve had it for a while, the chances are you’ll want to unlock the handset so you are free to put any sim card you like into the handset. By doing so you’ll be free to chose which operator/carrier you like at any point. Until recently, the only way to achieve this was by carrying out a process known as jailbreaking and subsequently software unlocking your iPhone. Such a process sometimes caused confusion and in some rare cases, rendered users handsets useless to them because they didn’t carefully follow the provided instructions. Thankfully, if you have an iPhone tied to the O2 network, there’s great news – you can now get your iPhone officially unlocked and in some cases for no fee!

Like many other existing Vodafone customers I was excited to learn that the iPhone will finally be (officially) available on the Vodafone UK network. Come the 14th January 2010, handsets will be available to new and existing customers. I’ve been enjoying using an iPhone 3G on the Vodafone network since around March/April 2009. Regular readers will be aware I’ve managed this by jailbreaking an O2 Pay and Go handset. Whilst I can enjoy the majority of iPhone features on my handset, there has been a key feature I’ve wanted to use for sometime and I’ve not been able to: Visual Voicemail.