Hacking My iPhone 3GS

If you are a long time reader of this blog ... nevermind there are no long time readers of this blog. Anyways as it turns out, two of my most popular blog posts of all time have been about hacking my phone. First there was Hacking my A950. That was about enabling MP3 playback and Bluetooth dial-up-networking on my Samsung A950. A year later came Hacking my 8830. This was mostly about useful tips for the Blackberry, along with a failed attempt to get GPS working (thanks for nothing Verizon.)

Two weeks ago I deactivated my Blackberry after two years of excellent service, and bought the new iPhone 3GS. I have been working on iPhone apps (one app in particular) so this made sense. Oh and the iPhone is the best phone ever. The Exchange support is so good on it that it is an easy move for a Blackberry user, but I digress. Back to the point. As a rite of passage, it was time for me to write about hacking the iPhone.

There are two things that I will point you would-be hackers to. First up is ringtones. Just like with the Blackberry, there is no need to spend any money on ringtones for the iPhone. There are a few ways to create ringtones on the iPhone. This is the guide that got me going. If you don't want to read it (you should) the idea is simple. A ringtone for the iPhone is an AAC encoded, .m4r file. So clip a song down to less 40 seconds, convert it to AAC, and rename the file from .m4a to .m4r. It is a painless process. I created a half dozen or so ringtones in a few minutes, mostly Girl Talk songs...

The other tip is also pretty well known. The iPhone OS 3. 0 has support for tethering and MMS, but neither is currently supported by AT&T. However you can hack this at the software level, and pwn AT&T. Here is the best guide I have found for this. What is great is that it only involves going to a web page in Mobile Safari, and it is easy to undo. For me it works great for tethering, but MMS did not get enabled.