500 Bucks!

As you may know, the iPhone is everything I ever wanted in a phone/PDA, and so I was happy to continue the relationship over here. Currently I'm still using my 1st gen iPhone, but the roaming charges are extortionate and I obviously don't want to continue the O2 UK contract. However, I suspect Apple might have something better around the corner so I'm reluctant to upgrade from the 1st gen device for now.

The ideal solution, I surmised, was to jailbreak my current phone for the interim and survive on a PAYG sim card. AT&T sold me a sim card for next to nothing. I have so far utterly failed to jailbreak...

On the macbook, in order to use Quickpwn or Pwnage to jailbreak the phone, since they rely on DFU mode, you have to install an older, developer version of the OS X USB kernel driver (cos Apple have disabled DFU mode in the current Leopard version). I've read that this can have some pretty adverse effects on the mac so I decided not to risk it. Unfortunately, the Windoze version of Quickpwn simply refuses to run on my Dell laptop... so I'm stuck. It a company laptop, and I have to jump through a couple of hoops in order to run things with administrator rights, but that's my only fallback left.

In a moment of weakness I headed back to the AT&T store to buy a spanking new 16Gb iPhone, but they wanted a $500 'deposit' since I haven't got a credit rating yet. 500 bucks!