As many of you already know I am a self-confessed Apple fanboy. It’s mostly because I have used their products since I was a child and their ease of use has always allowed me to spend more time using the machines and less time fixing them. I was recently given an iPhone as a gift from a friend and have been loving it. Of course once I had it up and running for a few days, I had to jump in and start hacking on it. It’s an amazing little piece of hardware.
The first thing I did was jailbreak it and change the ATT logo to a MSU Spartan logo. Oh yeah! Then I added custom ringtones and a bunch of custom apps like a NES emulator, IM client (catch me on AOL IM as doerrstop), drawing programs, text editor, voice recorder, and dictionary. This made the iPhone almost everything it should have been coming out of the box (except for GPS and video capture) When I was done I had a nearly perfect phone.
Then this morning I read about the new "update" for my iPhone from Apple…
The new firmware update adds a few new features like buying itunes music on your phone and a few minor tweaks to the interface that make it easier to get around. It doesn’t add video capture to the camera or any of teh things that I had hacked it to do…and it wipes out all the cool software hacks and then encrypts the filesystem, making it very difficult to rehack into.
Let’s just say that I was lucky enough to read up on the impact of the "update" before I clicked the install button and I won’t be upgrading anytime soon. (Unless someone cracks the encryption) I’m also a bit miffed that Apple is locking the phone down so hard and not giving users a way to make their iPhone experience customized. Without all the cool little apps I installed, the iPhone is nice (and still the best smartphone out there) but its no where near as powerful as what it with them.
I’m reading a lot of similar feelings on the web and if apple keeps this up, they may find that their biggest fans become their biggest critics. Next time you see me, let’s play a game of Zelda on my phone…it’s awesome.