Hwrms’ Tech Blog

This video is leaked from sina.com.cn. The oPhone is Lenovo’s new touch screen phone based by Google Android system. The design is alot similar to the Apple iPhone, but there are some bright spots on its interface design.

A new app called Clippy Beta just came out from Cydia, which enables real system level copy/paste support for iPhone and iPod.

I got my Clippy from a source called iSpazio (http://cydia.ispazio.net). The app is only about 23kb and the installing process cannot be any easier.

Since the Copy and Paste keys are integrated onto the keyboard, you can perfrom a copy and corresponding paste where ever you have access to the iPhone keyboard. Note: you have to click the number keyboard to access it.

To select phrases and words, all you have to do is hold and drag. The keyboard addon works really fast as well.

Clippy is still in beta stage, so there might be some bugs here and there, but I find it quite stable.

iPhone case/skin manufacture XSKN listed “iPhone Nano” as one of the categories for cases on their website. This is one of the most obvious evidence of the existence of the new iPhone.

XSKN has a history of leaking info about unreleased Apple products, such as iPhone 3G and iPod Nano 4th Gen.

First to clear things up, I do not mean that Meizu M8 is a better phone than iPhone, because the lack 3rd-party applications and so. Features I listed are what made M8 better iPhone in PARTICULAR areas, so enjoy!

If you don’t what Meizu M8 is, it is a iPhone-like mobile phone made by a Chinese manufacture called Meizu. Unlike other iPhone copycats, Meizu’s M8 is actually a good quality phone with a lot of innovations and is considered a compititive product againt iPhone. It is set to release in China in December 2008 and internationally in early 2009.

1) Innovative Unlock Screen

M8 has a very cool unlock screen. The unlock screen has four icons on the bottom of the screen. You unlock the phone by dragging any one the icon to the top of the screen. If you drag the phone icon, you will unlock the phone and go to the calling interface directly. Other icons work the same way.

2） Multiple Video, Audio Format Support

Unlike iPhone which support only few audio and video formats, M8 supports more than 17 audio and video formats.

Audio: APE, FLAC, OGG, WAV, WMA, MP3, AMR, ACC

Video: AVI, MP4, 3GP, MOV, ASF, WMV, MPEG, MKV, FLV

3) Custom Equalizer

iPhone only has equalizer presets for users to choose from, but M8 has it all.

4) Copy Paste!!!

What can I say, Apple just can’t do it…

5) Built-In Music ID3 Info + Album Art Editing

M8 allows you to edit music info and assign album covers on the mobile phone, so you don’t need to connect it to a computer to do it.

6) USB Drive!

You don’t need to jailbreak M8 to put files on your phone! And the speed is about 6MB/s reading and 4MB/s writing.

7) Better Camera

M8 has a 3.2 megapixels camera compare to iPhone’s 2.0 megapixels. You also have the choice of output formats (BMP, PNG,GIF,JPG,TIF).

Cheaper!!!

The unlocked Meizu M8 is about $400 US. The unlocked iPhone 3G is about $700 – $800 on eBay.

Even though iPhone’s 2.1 firmware increased its battery life slightly, the relatively short battery life is still a major problem for iPhone. And this problem grows as the apps for iPhone increases, since iPhone apps increase CPU and LCD usages. Here are some useful tips on how to save your precious iPhone battery life.

1) Lower Screen Brightness- if you are not under bright environment while using the phone, it is better to lower the LCD’s brightness. The screen is a major power consumer of IPhone. My little experiment shows that iPhone can still be used contineously under 10% battery with lowerst brightness for about 2 to 3 hours.

2) Set Auto-lock to 1min - When your phone if idle, it is a great oppertunity to save some battery.

3) Disable the ticking sound – The ticking sound that iPhone makes when you lock your phone or typing wastes battery through CPU usage and speaker usage.

4) Disable SSH when not needed (for jailbroken phones) – SSH service runs as a system process in the background which occupies your resources even when locked. Do it with BossPrefs tool.

5) Set Push Mail to manual – The Push feature does not seem to consume a lot of battery when you push mail or contacts once a hour or two, but when it is set to 10 or 20 min auto push, it becomes a problem.

6) Install as less themes as possible (for jailbroken phones) – Themes used on iPhone, especially ones with animation or features require internet are extreamely power-consuming.

7) Use wallpaper with brighter colors – Some users suggest that LCD display consume less battery when it is displaying brighter colors compare to dark colors.

8)  Disable typo correction (for jailbroken phones) – If you don’t find iPhone’s typo correction tool really helpful, disable it, because the indexing searching consumes a lot of resource. (SSH acces System/Library/TextInput, backup then delete TextInput _en.bundle )

9) Disable edge/3g if you don’t have subscriptions – Of course, they decrease your battery life.

10) Respring often (for jailbroken phones) - Last but not least, respring clears your extra memory usage and helps to reduce system load. Do it with BossPrefs or other apps.

via weiphone.com

This phone has a great interface and arguably better than the original iPhone. It is called Meizu M8, and it is still in the beta stage of developing. In the video, the system still react a little bit slow but sure there is room for improvements. And the best thing is, it is CHEAPER than iPhone.

If you have trouble with the video, download it from here

Via Weiphone.com

These iPhone themes are collected from the Internet for jailbroken iPhones (iPod Touch) with Summerboard installed. Theme folder should be placed in \var\root\media\library\summerboard\theme\ folder.

Notes: All themes are English, and all copyrights belong to the authors.

1. Beijing 2008

2. Notepad

3. China Wind

4. Hang’s Black

5. Mud

6. Zazoo’s Golden Armor

7. Blue Tears

8. Zazoo’s CoolBlue

9. YellowQ

10. BlackWood

Note: this post is completely written with the wordpress app, even the pictures are taken from the iphone and uploaded directly to the server.

I just got this wordpress app from Apple App Store, and I decided to write a review actually using it.

First you need to setup your wordpress account (from any server). Then Wordpress app will retrive recent posts list of your blog.

The posting feature is the best feature of this app. You can choose tags, catagory of your post. Pictures can be uploaded through your photo library or camara. However the pictures can only show at the end of the post.

In addition, you can preview your post in the actual blog (like in a browser). Password and post date setups are also available.

The wordpress app only support plain text input, or you can manuelly enter HTML code. The app runs fairly fast and without glitches. All together this is a great app but new feathers are needed to make it better.This app can easily become the future trend of blogging.

Change: So the author of Aurora Feint left a comment about the stored phone numbers and emails, and said they are only for community features of the game. There are no evidence of Aurora Feint actually uploading information to their server. But we hope in the next version of Aurora Feint, users should get informed after entering the game and preferably a option that let users to choose if they want to enable this community feature.

Original Conversation:

# Jason Citron Says:
Hey there,

Can you please correct this article? I’ve written a detailed outline of what we’re doing with people’s contact list data on our web site. The short answer is we only store what you type in to our application on the web server. We never spam, rent, sell, or do anything funky with your personal data.

If you have any further questions feel free to ask me personally.By the way, preventing the application from writing to the account data file will break your save games.- Jason CitronP.S. We are posting the privacy notice now. It should be live by noon PST.# admin Says:

admin Says:

Well, the problem is that users are not told by Aurora Feint that they are actually using the information stored in the Contacts application, and the personal information collected by the app is definitely not submitted through your website.So I would like to see you guys inform the users that you are actually using the contacts information from the iPhone, and let users to choose if they want Aurora Feint to use it for Community Features.

Thanks

-Stephen

Aurora Feint is a popular free App Store game, it even got to the top 25 list from official Apple site. Bur recently users report that they found Aurora Feint secretly collection iPhone (iPod Touch) Contact information.
So first I installed Aurora Feint from App Store and run the game for about few minutes.

Then to test if Aurora Feint actually collect person info, I added two Contacts, one email address, one note entry, and web history of google search.

Now I ran the game once again, clicked through the game so it gets the time to steal my personal info and store it XD.

Okay, now let’s check the result. Btw you will need a jailbroke iPhone and OpenSSH installed to access iPhone directory. Connect your iPhone from your computer through SSH client. Go to
/private/var/mobile/Applications/*****(Randomly generated code with iMmo.app in it)/Documents
There should be a file named iMmoAccountData , download the file and open it use any text editor.

And now, what do you discover? Oh My GOD, it’s the contact information I just entered!

Are you disgusted by Aurora Feint now? Time to delete it!

However, if you still want to play this game without it collecting anymore personal info, here is how to do it.

• Delete the original iMmoAccoutData in Documents folder
• Create a blank file named iMmoAccoutData and put it in the same folder
• Change the permission to 444 so Aurora Feint cannot modify this file any more.

Obviously Apple got some work to do about iPhone user privacy and properly managing App Store platform, so personal info cannot be easily collected without users notice.

If you like this article, please digg!

Note:This tutorial also apply to iPhone (not sure about 3G), make sure you setup Bootneutor properly during the process for unlocking the phone.

Note 2: The newest PwnageTool 2.0.1 has just been released, I recommend you to use it. People who are having trouble with the previous version (such as 1600 error), you should give 2.0.1 another try.

iPhone Dev Team has just released the PwnageTool 2.0 for Mac OS X and I will write a walkthrough for jailbreaking an iPod Touch.

What you will need: PwnageTool 2.0, a copy of the original 2.0 Firmware for iPod Touch (i used 5A347), an iPod Touch with any firmware or status, and Mac OS X (prefer Leopard)

1. Open PwnageTool 2.0 and choose Expert Mode (trust me, its not hard to work with. Click ‘iPod Touch’, then ‘next’.



2. Click “Browse for IPSW” and open the iPod Touch 2.0 firmware you’ve just downloaded.



3. In the next window choose “General” then continue.

   

4. Choose the root partition space for 3rd-party applications, I chose 1GB just in case.



5. Then pick the applications you want to be pre-installed into the firmware (pick whatever you would like to have installed)



6. Choose Cydia Installer.



7. Here comes the fun part of it, you get to choose custom boot logo and restore logo. (I am a Raptors fan my self XD).



8. Pick a location to save your jailbroken firmware and watch PwnageTool go to work!
9. After the building is done, it will ask if your iPod had been pwned before, choose according to your situation.



10. PwnageTool will then give you detailed instructions to put your iPod to DFU Mode.



Note: If PwnageTool says ‘failed to enter DFU mode’, follow the tutorial to do it manually.


11. Now you are done working with PwnageTool, open your iTunes 7.7 and it will say “iTunes detects iPod Touch in recovery mode…”. Hold Alt key then press the restore button, iTunes will let you pick the firmware file to restore. Choose the custom firmware PwnageTool made and start restoring.



12. After the process is completed, set up your iPod in iTunes just like how you usually do it.



13. Now your iPod is fully jailbroken and has Cydia installed.







Note: There are still some capability issues exist for Cydia Installer under 2.0 firmware, some apps and functions may not work properly.

Good luck, please comment your feedback.