My last post about Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X10  was a bit of a rant, as a friend pointed out. He’s not wrong… but I think it’s justified considering the obvious quality (or lack of) of their applications – both mobile and desktop. Anyway, I felt it was fair game to give my readers a more objective perspective on it because I’ve been asked after people have read my last few posts if I hated the Xperia – and I truly don’t, so something must have been unclear or my sentiments weren’t properly displayed. I never said I was a qualified blogger, I just thought I’d put the info out there because there’s so few of it as of this moment on the Internet. Keep in mind that I’ve switched to the Xperia last week after using an iPhone 3G for two years. There will be some heavy comparing done here. So here comes a more professional, if you will, review of the X10a.
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This blog somehow became very popular among iPhone hackers and users in the last year, mostly due to my Cydia articles and iPhone HOWTOs. Well, I hope you enjoyed that cause that’s not gonna happen anymore; this Friday, I’m getting an Android. Why? Well I’m glad you asked.

1. Number one reason to justify this switch can be said very simply: Apple. Their product was revolutionary – the iPhone is to the cell phone market what the iPod was to the MP3 Players market and don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing product. There is, however, a divergence of ideas in my relationship with Apple. They like their users locked in, powerless, doomed to abide by Apple’s terms of services. What’s worse than that is that Apple has absolute power over what it created. It’s not wrong per se – hardware-wise (hello, Gizmodo!), but for everything else, it’s a dictatorship. Everything is closed-sourced. Apple has the right (and abuses it) to refuse third party applications for whatever reason they choose, even if it’s merely because it implements a feature better than the way Apple implemented it, but they’re not afraid to steal features from said third-party developers when comes the time to release a new OS (WinterBoard, BossPaper, Backgrounder, etc). Look up what they’ve done in the last few years, from their multiple app refusals to their unsaid definition of the future of Mobile… I will not support that.
2. Another reason would be that, well, I’ve been there and I’ve done that. I know the iPhone inside and out and there’s not much left that I can experiment save from taking the thing apart (which I will invariably end up doing with my 3G once I get an Android).
3. Sony Ericsson just came out with the Xperia X10, and she’s a beauty. It’s available on Rogers with for a relatively expected cost. I’m still debating the device a bit, but it’ll be an Android. It’s not an iPhone, but it’s pretty damn close. Close enough to be familiar and different enough that it might be a whole other thing.
4. Android. It’s backed by Google. It’s open-source. I like the philosophy, anyone who knows me know that I’m a fierce open-source advocate, it makes sense to support an open-source community and leave a tyrannical one, even if the alternative wouldn’t be as good. Fortunately, it appears to be.
5. I will not need to hack it up to get it to do what I want. Well okay, Rogers (my carrier) has locked the Xperia X10 to Android 1.6, and I will have to investigate as to why they’ve done that. I might need to hack around a bit to stick it to the man and get Android 2.1 on it, but that’s expected. Carriers are abusive, restrictive assholes and will always be – I’m willing to deal with that for lack of viable alternatives.

All that to say that from this point on, this blog (whatever it is) will turn its focus from the iPhone to the Android, more specifically and in all likelihood, the Xperia X10… with Rogers. I will document my evolution with this new and unknown world that is Android and hope that it will help you solve your problems or maybe even convince you that Apple is the new Microsoft, and you should switch before you side with a corporate giant who wants to control and restrict everything there is going to be about the emerging market that is mobile.

This is the single most important thing that’s happened to the iPhone alternative market since the jailbreak came out.  David “planetbeing” Wong somehow managed to run Android on an iPhone, dual booting with OpenIBoot. Check out the video below, then check out planetbeing’s post about this, and get the files for what he calls iDroid! It’s not clear yet whether this works on anything but iPhone 2G (as used in the video) – I wouldn’t try this on a 3G or 3GS just yet. But still, this is pretty big!

If you’ve ever jailbroken your iPhone in the last months, you know how much of a necessity the freedom of an independent third-party alternative can be. The guys involved in cracking Apple’s continous efforts to fortify the box their customers agree to be locked in have been doing excessively great. Whenever Apple released a new firmware version in beta, they were on the case trying to get around the various protections to allow users the freedom to choose. They would do so impressively fast, too. Now, with iPhoneOS 3.1, Apple decided to up the ante.

Should you decide to update your pre-3.1 device to 3.1, Apple will make it so that not only does it wipe your jailbreak data, but make it nearly impossible for the user to manipulate the device in the future. As it is a highly technical subject, I’ll simply direct you to Jay “saurik” Freeman’s article which covers everything you need to know about this particular topic.

That being said, there’s a hard reality out there. 3.1 is out, and iPhone owners want their devices — may they be jailbroken or vanilla — to run the latest firmware. It’s absolutely normal, and even encouraged. Nowadays, you need to stay on top of software updates for security purposes, if anything. To that reality, you can add the current problem those people have: you can’t jailbreak 3.1. Today, I’m going to enumerate the possibilities that lay before you as a jailbroken iPhone owner who wants to update to 3.1. more…

I’ve been rocking a jailbroken iPhone for a few months now, and I must say I absolutely love it. It feels just like when I switched to Linux: power to the community, freedom of choice and usage, open source spirit… and you’re pretty much on your own if shit hits the fan. I’ve blogged about the best Cydia applications I found in the past (Top 10 Cydia Apps and Top 10 Cydia Apps Redux), but I feel it’s time to update that list and share it with you all. “Why?” might you ask. Simple. My needs and interests change regularly. The software source being Cydia, applications can be harder to find than with the centralized Apple App Store. New apps are added to Cydia on a daily basis, and new repositories are created daily, so new stuff is easy to find – good stuff is harder. There are a few tools on the interwebs to help you by attempting to centralize the Cydia apps information (appRater, ModMyi, hackint0sh, iPhoneFreakz, BigBoss, iSpazio), but it’s still more challenging than your search-and-tap routine.

Here goes a revamped list of my current essential Cydia apps for your jailbroken iPhone in no particular order. I’m gonna leave out the obvious like Cydia and OpenSSH.

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You’ve all been annoyed at the default iPhone sounds sooner or later. They’re pretty ordinary, I’ll agree with you. One of the extremely useful features of JailBreaking your device is that you have the power to change the default sounds for pretty much any event. Today, I’ll show you how to replace your default SMS tones with custom ones of your choosing. In order to do so, you’ll need a jailbroken iPhone (running 2.x), Cydia, OpenSSH and optionally WinterBoard. You’ll also need the audio file you want to use (obviously) an SSH client (ideally a graphical SFTP frontend like FireFTP) and an audio editing application like Audacity. Ready? Here goes! more…