Jailbreak your iOS device with greenpois0n

Sure, jailbreaks have been around for a long time now, but there hasn’t been a good, untethered jailbreak for the current iOS software until Chronic Dev released their updated greenpois0n tool last week. This Jailbreak even works with the newly released 4.2.6 Verizon iPhones. We’ve had the opportunity to put it through the paces and we liked it. Please remember, this is for jailbreaking only. Chronic Dev suggests using TinyUmbrella to preserve your baseband before you update but we’re not covering that process today. Even still, the current version of greenposi0n does not “hacktivate” the device; you’ll need to run redsn0w after greenpois0n if you’re trying to unlock your device. There still isn’t a good unlocking solution for 4.2.1 modem firmware 03.10.01. We’ll probably have to wait until 4.3 comes out… or maybe longer before we see a current, unlockable baseband. There are still plenty of reasons to jailbreak even if you’re not interested in unlocking your device. We’ll cover those in another post later. This jailbreak is only compatible with devices that can multi-task but here’s a list: iPhone 3GS iPhone 4 iPhone 4 Verizon iPad 1st Generation iPod touch 2nd Generation iPod touch 3rd Generation iPod touch 4th Generation So, [...]

Hands on with Verizon’s Pantech UML290 4G LTE modem

No, we’re not a Verizon blog (we’re still on AT&T) but we have had the opportunity to put a lot of the new Verizon gear through the paces lately. Our latest frolic was with the Pantech UML290 from Verizon. It’s the first 4G-capable, Mac-compatible modem available from Verizon. The modems have been available from VZW for a couple months but they weren’t Mac-compatible. Thankfully, VZW pushed out an update to the VZAccess Manager software last week… we downloaded, installed and tested right away. Let’s start with the good stuff: speed. We were able to get 10mbps down or faster in all of our testing. That’s it. Everything else is pretty… meh. All of that “meh” relates to the poor performance of Verizon’s VZAccess Manager. Downloading and installing it was easy enough but connecting to the Verizon 4G LTE network proved to be very cumbersome and definitely not user-friendly. Even though we could see the 4G modem and the 4G network in the access manager, we couldn’t get our MacBook Pro to connect. Without a good walkthrough, we ended up guessing many of the configuration steps. We searched online and couldn’t find an updated setup guide for Mac connectivity. We plugged [...]

Enable Verizon iPhone Personal Hotspot

One of my friends asked me a couple questions about their new Verizon iPhone this morning… and I couldn’t answer the last one easily. They were excited to get everything going but they couldn’t figure out how to enable the Personal Hotspot feature of their new phone. Everything I saw online showed it on the homescreen of the Settings application, but you have to enable it first. Settings -> General -> Network From there, it’s pretty self-explanatory but neither of us knew the right place to look. After thinking about it for a bit, I headed straight for the phone’s network settings, but it’s really not something that your average iPhone user would figure out. That’s why we’re blasting out this helpful how-to. Let us know if you have any other questions about your new Verizon iPhone and we’ll see what we can do to help.

Verizon iPhone 4 cannot be unlocked

This post will put all of the rumors to rest: you will not see an unlock for the Verizon iPhone. We’re sorry to be the bearer of bad news but the complication involved with the Verizon iPhone unlock is two-fold: it’s completely illegal, and every unlock would require carrier-specific adjustments to succeed. If you were to follow @MuscleNerd and @pytey on Twitter, you too would have come across this information. The conversation started with MuscleNerd tweeting this: An “unlock” of next week’s iPhoneVZW is more than just custom code exec… it involves per-carrier CDMA adjustments. Pytey chimed in right away to explain that this is outright illegal: A non-sanctioned iP4VZ ‘unlock’ would require an ESN/MEID from a donor phone with service. This technique is a US federal crime. That’s not awesome. We don’t assume that everyone will understand that, s0 let us break it down for you. We can unlock AT&T iPhones because they are GSM — they use a SIM card to talk to the carrier. The AT&T SIM card can be removed and replaced with a T-Mobile (or an international carrier’s) SIM card. The current unlock only changes how the phone can communicate with the SIM card… it [...]

iPhone 4 breaks Verizon launch record

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone… The iPhone 4 broke all previous Verizon device-launch records within the first two hours of its pre-sale. What does this mean? Every device that has debuted on Verizon was overcome by the iPhone 4 sales in the first two hours. Furthermore, no one cares about Android or Blackberry. Well, maybe someone cares but it’s not necessarily Verizon customers. A new survey from uSamp (link to PDF) states that a whopping 50 percent of current Verizon customers plan to switch away from their Android or Blackberry phones for the iPhone 4. This is only a random survey of 700 Verizon customers but that’s still great news for Apple. Keeping those numbers in mind, we’re hoping you already pre-ordered your iPhone 4. The pre-orders sold out within the first 17 hours of the sale that was limited to existing Verizon customers. That doesn’t count the number of people who are willing to cancel their AT&T contracts (26 percent of iPhone 4 users) for the Verizon iPhone 4. Ultimately, we expect that the Verizon iPhone 4 will be more difficult to get than Super Bowl tickets for the next few weeks. Hopefully, Apple’s manufacturing will keep [...]

Verizon iPhone 4 rumors persist

To be honest, we’re extremely tired of writing about the potential Verizon iPhone. Everyone knows that the iPhone 4 exclusivity contracts are either recently expired, will expire soon or invalidated by AT&T’s terrible representation of a great Apple product. We can’t pick one source for this article… it’s been discussed by countless sources since the 1st generation iPhone came out in 2007. Instead of getting your hopes up, we’ll give you all of the reasons the iPhone won’t be coming to Verizon any time soon (was that too confident?). Hardware If you’re reading this website, you probably know this: the iPhone 4 cannot work on Verizon. Unlocking your iPhone can only get you to T-Mobile here in the United States and maybe some smaller carriers that piggyback on the GSM networks. Let’s go further… current iPhone hardware uses GSM technology to reach your cell provider. GSM is a well-utilized standard across the world: Verizon is one of the few networks using CDMA. Hardware is the main reason a Verizon rollout would be difficult.