Memos from March 2009

Unlock Phones from AT&T

· Comment

So in prepa­ra­tion to going to Europe, I want­ed to be able to have a cell­phone (mobile) handy in case of an emer­gency. I want­ed to just use the iPhone 3G but I have updat­ed to iPhone OS 2.2.1 with a base­band of 2.30.03, which there is no (soft­ware) unlock for. Luck­i­ly, I still have kept my Sam­sung Black­jack (1).

Here’s what I found out when get­ting my Black­jack unlocked:

  • Call 611 (Cus­tomer Ser­vice), and not the local AT&T store.
  • Unlock­ing is “free” (accord­ing to the CSR who helped me).
  • Give your IMEI num­ber to the CSR to receive your phone’s unlock code.
  • To get your phone’s IMEI num­ber, press *#06#
  • To pro­ceed with the unlock process:
    • Take out the SIM card if there are any first.
    • You have to do the fol­low­ing key­strokes: #7465625*638*unlock_code# (unlock_code is your own of course).
    • Your phone’s dis­play will then have some type of mes­sage that it has dis­abled a lock of some sort.

I hope that helps.

Apple’s New Ipod Shuffle

· Comment
apple-ipod-shuffle-20090311

It seems that Apple just released their new iPod Shuf­fle today. VoiceOver seems to be the newest tech­nol­o­gy oth­er than the new form-fac­tor. They say its half-the-size of the pre­vi­ous one, and has a capac­i­ty of 4GB. In terms of col­or, its cur­rent­ly avail­able in sil­ver or black.

apple-ipod-shuffle-20090311-key apple-ipod-shuffle-20090311-controls

The only thing I’m wor­ried about is that you have to use the built-in con­trols on the ear­phones that comes with it (or am I miss­ing some­thing?). That’s actu­al­ly a pret­ty big one to weigh out.

apple-ipod-shuffle-20090311-controls-earphones

That would suck if you’d like to use some­thing else and/or replace it in the future. You won’t be able to Play, Pause, Skip, etc. Any­ways, I per­son­al­ly would­n’t buy this new one and would stick with the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion just because of the lim­i­ta­tion of hav­ing to play songs only through the ear­phones.

I’m hop­ing I’m not the only one that finds this as a big con­cern.

Update
For more details regard­ing the new iPod Shuf­fle’s ear­bud-con­trols, read up on Giz­mod­o’s arti­cle: Con­firmed: Your iPod Shuf­fle Ear­buds Need Pro­pri­etary Chip to Func­tion.