Before I go defile myself with burgers and beer I wanted to jailbreak my iPhone 3GS for you all. The process was amazingly simple. Using a Windows netbook - it doesn’t work under Windows 7 - I simply installed iTunes and ran purplera1n. It took a second to reboot then it rolled through recovery mode, rebooted, and an app called Freeze appeared. Freeze then installed Cydia and all was right with the world.

If you were reading a major paper this weekend, you’d notice a striking ad. There’s the Palm Pre resting against an apple core with the words:

The Palm Pre does things the iPhone can’t. Run multiple applications at the same time with real-time updates and even save $1200 over two years. It’s the perfect time to join the Now Network, America’s most trusted 3G network, bringing you the first and only 4G network from a national carrier.

The real call to action was to iPhone users with lapsed contracts - presumably iPhone users who bought the original iPhone two years ago and never upgraded to the 3G - a cohort that I suspect consists of perhaps five Palm engineers and maybe our tech-savvy grandparents. It’s a small number, friends. A small number.

An exercise for the reader:

First, we present Fracture. You tap the iPhone to “crack” the screen and then you tap again to cause the apps to explode, triggering the rest of the apps to explode in rapid succession. Next, we find SkyFart. You press a little man and he farts. Then you press him again and he farts and again and flies into space. Then you press him again and he farts and flies. Then you press him again…

So which app was accepted by the App store with open arms and which one was rejected?

The logical thing to say, based on the common understanding that the expression of gas and fecal matter as a mode of transport is considered by some to be offensive, is that SkyFart would be rejected out of hand. This is not true.

I’m not a svelte man anymore, I’ll admit. Two kids - I ate them both - and lots of beer have forced my metabolism to run, cowering, resulting in size changes that would swallow the average man. This product is what I need.

The BodyTrace is a wireless scale that sends your shame to the Internet, allowing you to follow your slow decline - or incline - into our out of lassitude. It will be available in November for $119 and it costs $19.99 for a three month weight loss subscription.

The system also includes a grouping feature so you an add your friends and family to your fight - or even create social groups of like-minded fat losers - and the service also makes suggestions for eating and working out. You can also upload progress pictures and cry when they never change, not once.

Live from the HTC press event.

The era of true Android customization has begun with HTC’s Sense UI, a customized overlay for Android that adds HTC’s stunning graphical interface to the sturdy Android OS. The UI will run on the new Hero, a 3.2-inch touchscreen phone running at 528MHz with MicroSD slot.

More specs on the phone:

With its 3.2-inch HVGA display, the HTC Hero is optimized for Web, multimedia and other content, while maintaining a small size and weight that fits comfortably in your hand. It also boasts a broad variety of hardware features including AGPS, digital compass, gravity-sensor, 3.5mm stereo headset jack, a five mega-pixel autofocus camera and expandable MicroSD memory. HTC Hero also includes a dedicated Search button that goes beyond basic search, providing you with a more natural, contextual search experience that enables you to search through Twitter, locate people in your contact list, find emails in your inbox or search in any other area in Hero.

The new Android UI will have something called “Perspectives,” a new method for connecting email, contacts, and social media automatically. This version will also be the first to support Flash natively.

Watch this post for live info as we get it.

Adobe and HTC are bringing Flash to Android on its new Hero smartphone. The implementation will support video and audio codecs familiar to users of Flash on the desktop. Check this post for more info as we get it.

The HTC Hero delivers powerful, compatible video playback performance using Flash technology, and interactive content enabled by ActionScript® 2.0. Users can enjoy and navigate through Web videos using intuitive video controls. With progressive streaming of large MP3 audio files from a Web server and the local file storage, the HTC Hero provides a seamless audio experience. Support for Sorenson and On2 VP6 codecs enables higher quality video and playback of existing Web content. A demo of the user experience enabled by the Flash Platform on the HTC Hero and the Android operating system can be viewed at www.adobe.com/go/htchero.

There’s a long thread at Apple’s discussion board about sporadic Wi-Fi failures under iPhone 3.0. It seems that the Wi-Fi eventually poops out, resulting in no Wi-Fi connectivity even inches from the router. The only fix seems to be turning off push email.

Essentially, WiFi works fine after the phone has been freshly booted (i.e. right after a restart) - however, once it has put itself into standby mode it will no longer download data over a WiFi connection after the phone is turned on again. It remains able to find the WiFi network, but simply refuses to download data over it.

The dev team has released their latest carrier unlock, ultrasn0w, It requires a quick using redsn0w and then the installation of ultrasn0w through Cydia. If you’ve already jailbroken your iPhone 3G simply add repo666.ultrasn0w.com to your repositories list and download ultrasn0w.

What does this do? It carrier unlocks the iPhone 3G. Sadly, it doesn’t yet work on the 3G S. It is also safe to update to the latest 3.0 version.

Every day the Internet pays lip service to the “apps” “yanked” by Apple. But what happens when something Apple does in the SDK shuts down an entire type of app, namely the camera apps that added interesting new functionality to the phone?

Jared Brown write Quick Shot, an app that added a number of cool features to the iPhone camera.

Apple has decided to strictly enforce their SDK guidelines with the release of 3.0, leaving potentially millions of iPhone users with applications that will not be compatible with iPhone OS 3.0. Maybe you are already aware of this, but I had not seen anything written on Techcrunch and thought it was compelling enough to bring to your attention.

Our company, Code Monkeys at Work, produces an application, Quick Shot. It’s a camera application, not unlike Night Camera. It has been live in the App Store since mid-Feb. When the 3.0 beta came out we updated it to be compatible and submitted it. Each time we submit an update to Quick Shot we cross our fingers, since we always get a different reviewer who takes issue with features/graphics/text that were already approved in earlier versions. Although this time when it got rejected it caught us by complete surprise.

First, an anecdote: when the iPhone first launched in 2007 I took it on a tour of Central Europe, namely Budapest and Warsaw. Communism had just fallen and the hopes and dreams of these benighted nations were dashed. But as I pulled the iPhone from its protective cozy, the eyes of those present were filled with hope again, hope that there was something better out there, something magical. That something was called the iPhone and it was this promise, the promise of a Jobsian escape from the gristmill of history. All of this in a cigarette-pack-sized cellphone.

Fast forward two years. With the release of the iPhone 3G S we can safely say that the bloom is off the rose. The 3G S looks exactly like the iPhone 3G in every way. There is no outward identification and, in those intervening years, Hungary, Poland, the UK, Russia - heck, everybody - got the iPhone. Pulling one of these out is like pulling out something like a tin of Altoids - a bit against the grain but common enough to discourage gawking. So we must answer a few questions in this review. They are:

* What are the major improvements?
* Who is this phone for?
* Should you buy one/should you upgrade?

And so we begin.

It’s happened again. Apple has officially rejected an app that at first blush seems harmless and fun. This time it’s a Commodore 64 emulator from Manomio that offered a realistic joystick and keyboard, portrait and landscape gaming, and a fully licensed C64 emulator code. It was all on the up and up. Apple seemed excited. But then Manomio got the dreaded rejection mail:

Thank you for submitting C64 1.0 to the App Store. We’ve reviewed C64 1.0 and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it violates the iPhone SDK Agreement; “3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).”

Yes, the major media figure on the Internet has an iPhone 3G S. On initial examination, I’d safely say that if you’re planning on getting an iPhone with a new contract, go ahead. The price is right and the features are great.

Everything on this phone is snappier - Maps especially - and the auto-focus and video uploads passed the wife test who said that this is what she’s been looking for from the iPhone from the beginning. Looks like someone is going to have to upgrade someone.

Gruber found some information that the AT&T tethering plan would cost $55 a month and suggests - but cannot confirm - that this will be in addition to the unlimited data plan already in place, potentially hitting the $85 per month for data. I, like him, find this outrageous and can only pray that this number will be more like $55 total.

On the aggregate, traffic on wireless networks is fairly low. Major carriers built out quite a bit of bandwidth - they just needed the right customers, applications, and phones to use it correctly. When I was a telecom consultant back in 1999 we were already talking about 3G but no one wanted to start up the pipe for fear of - what? I don’t know. Maybe they were afraid people would use it, downloading WAP pages willy-nilly.

UPDATE - Just go here with your iPhone browser. This enables tethering and if you reboot you can get MMS. MMS is still wonky on AT&T, though. You can also try the longer way below.

Sorry, AT&T, but you can’t hide tethering from the very folks who taught you, long ago, what it meant to truly tether. First, download this carrier update and then type this into Terminal.

Yesterday we posted about Alice and Kev, homeless Sims that exist entirely in the world of Sims 3. They are a family. Alice is a girl with the traditional adolescent pre-teen worries but she’s saddled with a father who is high-strung, hates kids, and is generally a misfit in the orderly world of the Sims. They are homeless in that they live in a house with no walls and sleep on park benches. They have no source of food except for things given to them from other Sims or stolen in the course of the day. They can’t get clean in their own home - there’s no bathroom - and Alice’s sleep is interrupted constantly by Kev’s rants.

Rob Burkinshaw created the experiment, called Alice and Kev, as an examination of game theory and a test of his in-game photography skills but it quickly morphed into one of the most heart-breaking stories I’ve read in a long time.

The iPod Comet orbits the Earth in a bi-annual rotation, bringing new devices and attendant accessories into our view every Spring and Fall. The constellation is followed by a set of third-party developers and manufacturers who bolster the cloud as it swings into view and then disappear as the excitement wears off, relegating the devices to CostCos and Sam’s Clubs until the next rotation. But this season the orbit brought an anomaly: the Palm Pre, a device that is ostensibly compatible with the cloud, namely iTunes, but is definitely not of Apple’s world.

The Pre, as you’ll remember, masquerades as an iTunes-compatible device, a feature that Apple promises will soon be remedied through software updates. To this Palm replied:

“Palm’s media sync works with the current version of iTunes,” Palm spokesperson Lynn Fox told me. “If Apple chooses to disable media sync in a future version of iTunes, it will be a direct blow to their users who will be deprived of a seamless synchronization experience. However, people will have options. They can stay with the iTunes version that works to sync their music on their Pre, they can transfer the music via USB, and there are other third-party applications we could consider.”

Not content to let others do the heavy lifting, Pure Digital, now part of Cisco, has added Flip Channels to their popular - and surprisingly useful - FlipShare software. The software is pre-installed on every Flip devices (we have the HD) and the Channels are yet another way to upload and share your videos in the interwebs.

Videos sent to your channel can be viewed at FlipShare.com or using the FlipShare iPhone app, also available today. The software also supports DVD authoring and standard sharing with YouTube and MySpace. I sent a video to myself using the service, a real cinematic magnum opus. You cannot formally embed videos sent to channels - you can embed them on the sly using the actual HTML or grabbing to a site like Posterous - but obviously you can embed videos sent to YouTube.

In an example of rolling over in the name of “good relationships,” the Pre Dev Wiki has shut down their tethering page because “Sprint could get angry.” This is in stark contrast with iPhone devs who couldn’t give two squirts about “good relationships” and instead produce interesting technical content including unlocked phones.

“We have been politely cautioned by Palm that any discussion of tethering during the Sprint exclusivity period (and perhaps beyond—we don’t know yet) will probably cause Sprint to complain to Palm, and if that happened then Palm would be forced to react against the people running the IRC channel and this wiki.

Now this is the hack of the weekend or the hoax of the weekend. Some intrepid hackers have run what appears to be iPhone OS 2.x on a “multi-touch” monitor with accelerometer support. I’ve found a few examples of monitors that could potentially pull this off but I haven’t been able to pin down a model number. However, because iPhone OS is basically a Linux Mach kernel it should be bootable on Intel hardware - at least in an emulator - all of this is feasible.

We’ll do a little digging but as it stands it’s an impressive hack.

Another month, another version of the Kindle. I’ve been using a Kindle since it was shaped like a very thin doorstop and I’m delighted each time I see a new version. The latest version is the DX, a monstrous 9-inch version of the smaller Kindle 2 that supports direct PDF reading without conversion.

Why am I interested in the Kindle? Well, I already have a first-gen Kindle so I’m not too keen on upgrading immediately. But I’ve been waiting for Amazon to solve something with the Kindle DX that has been nagging me for quite a while. You see, I have a problem. I don’t want to read the New York Times on paper anymore but paper seems like the only logical way to read it. Reading the newspaper on a gadget is rude and dangerous - especially with toddlers around the house. It’s a tough sell to have a gadget at the breakfast table. But then I know that I’ll never read it on the desktop whether through the Times Reader or any other source. So the DX sounded great. It has all of the features of the current Kindle plus rotational sensing and a beautiful, huge screen that might just fit the entire NYT front page and not just one article. So that’s why I wanted to see the DX.

Jack Conte is an Internet musician who makes his living from selling MP3s online and generally running around like a madman making great music. I was introduced to him through Electro-Harmonix but I was amazed when I found the rest of his great music online. I met with him at a cafe in San Francisco where we drank huge bowls of coffee and talked music, technology, and hardware. He makes videosongs of himself recording his songs and sells his music online. Oddly enough, he also Tweets.

CG: So from a hardware perspective, and I know you use a lot of gear, it’s interesting how far things have come from your Dad’s old amp in the basement to a box that does everything for you. How have things changed in your experience so far and in terms of being a musician trying to get an authentic sound?

Jack: I think my ear is pretty good, but I don’t have formal training so my ear isn’t that good. I know when I like a sound. I’m pretty confident knowing when I like something… sometimes it’s the “wrong thing” but in terms of gear I always like the old stuff. My philosophy is that if it’s still around, it’s stuff people couldn’t bear to throw away.

The thing that’s cool about Electro-Harmonix is that they still make all those old pedals and old tubes. It’s tempting to get those electronic guitar boxes that does everything - I’ve had those before - but instead of opening doors they kind of close doors. The limitations imposed by that gear, using certain analog pedals, adds creative stimulation.

iSamurai is a crazy two-player app from Toy Kite that recreates real Samurai sword fighting without the flesh wounds or ritual disembowelment.

The app uses the iPhone’s built-in motion sensor and accelerometer to tell where the iPhone is in space and make noises that suggest that you are fighting with swords. It connects to another player’s iPhone with peer-to-peer networking and looks pretty goofy. Clearly the concept of fighting with invisible swords takes a bit of skill and imagination but it’s a fascinating use of all of the iPhone’s motion features. It’s available now for 99 cents.

There has been plenty of ink spilled over the 3G S upgrade (”Now faster with oleoresistant skin!”) and it’s abundantly clear what folks are trying to do here. Early adopters have always chafed at having to pay outrageous fees for upgrades inside of a contract period. Be it the latest RAZR a few years ago or the latest iPhone today, the same obsessives who are ranting about iPhone upgrade pricing were trying this same trick years ago - but now they have some leverage.

We’re here in Moscone and ready to rock. Watch this space for upcoming coverage and live streaming from the convention center. What will we see from Apple? An iPhone 3GS? A tablet? Steve? Robot Steve?

Follow along with WWDC Bingo and tune in at 10am PT/1pm ET for full live coverage. Until then, head to MobileCrunch or CrunchGear for live updates during the long wait.

Update: And we’re off! New Macbook, new Snow Leopard OS<>/a>, 40 million iPhones sold, but no Steve Jobs. Here’s a recap.