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Mobile phone carrier Orange Poland admitted today that it hired actors to stand in line for the country’s iPhone debut.

“It was a part of our marketing strategy, the concept was thought up at Orange Poland,” the company told the Associated Press. “The aim was to ‘warm up’ the atmosphere around the launch of the iPhone.”

Seen on “Sprint Connection”:

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The iPhone shortage may be good news for Sprint, which launched the iPhone-challenging Samsung Instinct in June.

In other words, the more customers AT&T gets, the better it is for Sprint…

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Here you go. [appears to be down for now, we took link down until we can revive the poor wounded server]

We’ll be releasing a more official announcement soon, but we wanted to get the tool out there. We sincerely hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed making it

Update 1: Just to clear up some confusion over what this actually does: yes, it jailbreaks and unlocks older iPhones, and jailbreaks iPhone 3Gs and iPod Touches. We only support the 2.0 firmwares.

Update 2: It looks like there aren’t enough TCP ports on that server, so _BigBoss_ has generously offered to mirror it.

Update 3: If you get Error 1600 from iTunes (or if you see in your log a failure to prepare x12220000_4_Recovery.ipsw), try: mkdir “~/Library/iTunes/Device Support” ;  if that directory already exists, remove any files in it.  Then re-run PwnageTool.  

Update 4: Here’s another mirror.

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So guys, below is a link to the video of the upcoming PwnageTool 2.0

Many many hours have gone into this and now it should be as easy enough for your grandmother to use.

We’ve added lots of new features, including 2.0 support, spotlight file indexing of .ipsws, canned websearches, installer custom configuration, custom root partitions and various other things that you’ll see on the release. Release date is soon although not this weekend. So check out the video, hopefully it will hold you off until we release.

High res is here

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Retail employees have received instructions on how to activate iPhones, and are given special instructions to let the customer bond immediately with their iPhone.

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We performed this disassembly immediately following the iPhone launch at 12:01 July 11, 2008, New Zealand time. That’s 5:01 AM, July 10, Pacific time for those of us who aren’t islanders.

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Onder grote belangstelling is vrijdag om middernacht de eerste iPhone in Nederland verkocht. Meer dan achthonderd geïnteresseerden en een grote schare journalisten hadden zich rond die tijd verzameld voor de deuren van de winkel van T-Mobile aan de Lijnbaan in Rotterdam.

[..]

De gelukkige eerste bezitter is de 47-jarige Edwin Driesen uit Den Haag. De man had sinds donderdagochtend 9.30 uur staan wachten op het mobiele kleinood. Op de vraag wat hij thuis als eerste met zijn iPhone ging doen, luidde het nuchtere antwoord “opladen”.

Kennelijk geen vaste Apple-klant, anders had hij wel geweten dat Apple graag ziet dat dingen direct uit de doos te gebruiken zijn, en dat z’n iPhone dus met een (bijna) volle batterij uit de doos zal komen. Maar hij verdient bonus punten met de droogheid van het antwoord…

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This changes the game in my living room. Completely. My media center’s remote is now more powerful than any computer I bought in the 1990s.

On Windows, Acrobat reader has been a piece of utter crap for quite a while now. And now it sucks on Mac OS just as much. (Where, I have to admit, I’ve been keeping it off my machines, since Mac OS understands pdf very well by itself, thank you very much)

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Apple sells Mac OS X just as it retails music: it markets both products toward premium buyers at reasonable prices rather than attempting to force thieves to pay for a product they only want to steal. Microsoft failed in the music business with Windows Media because it tried to do just the opposite: force everyone to pay through the nose for expiring subscription music by using egregious DRM. Microsoft couldn’t force the thieves to stop stealing, and premium customers weren’t interested in being treated like thieves.

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Nokia has bought up the bits of Symbian it didn’t already own and is chucking the OS into an open-source foundation along with the S60 UI layer, accompanied by Sony Ericsson and DoCoMo, who are throwing in UIQ and MOAP(S) respectively.

[..]

Those members will have to cough up at least $1,500 a year, but that’s chicken feed to companies such as AT&T and Vodafone, which have come on board to endorse the more open Symbian platform.

Good move. Let’s hope it works out. Apple could use the competition.

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But, just for fun, let’s say you bought an 8 GB iPhone the day they were released for $599. Months later you got an Apple Store gift certificate for $100 when the price was cut, meaning you’re effectively out only $499 (yes, assuming you were going to buy something from the Apple Store anyway). Now, you turn around and sell it on eBay for $400.

Your total cost for that 8 GB iPhone?

$99 plus tax.

The Macalope doesn’t know about you, but he’s trying really hard to feel like a sucker and it’s just not working.

Maybe he’s doing it wrong.

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In another study by Rubicon Consulting, the firm asked iPhone owners “When you got your iPhone, what model of mobile phone, if any, did it replace?” The findings are quite interesting. Unsurprisingly, many of the replaced models are high-end smartphones like Windows Mobile phones (14%), Blackberries (13%) and Palm (7%) devices. However, almost a quarter (24%) of respondents upgraded to their iPhone having previously owned a Motorola RAZR.

If we accept that the RAZR was first and foremost a fashion phone, then the Rubicon findings are at first a little peculiar. While it is logical that a smartphone user would be attracted to a feature-rich device like the iPhone, why have so many iPhone owners migrated over from a single handset model which had virtually no technical merits to speak of? As a feature phone, the RAZR’s functionality was indistinguishable from the raft of other feature phones on the market at the time. It is true that the RAZR sold enormously well, but not to the extent that 24% of the US phone-carrying public had one.

The iPhone and RAZR share a common feature and is why a disproportionate number of RAZR owners have moved in Apple’s direction. It is a feature that has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with style. The RAZR was an iconic device in terms of its design and this was its primary appeal to consumers. When looking to upgrade 18 months later, many RAZR owners now want to move to something equally stylish and the iPhone fits this bill. And while consumers may have purchased their RAZR subsidised, they have been willing to pay full price for the iPhone to continue owning a phone strong fashion credentials.

The RAZR had style? Was there a memo I missed?

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One of the biggest revelations at WWDC was quietly unveiled in a session on Friday morning entitled “Building Native Look-and-Feel Web Applications Using SproutCore.” While Apple maintained high security during the entire NDA-sealed WWDC session, the secret of SproutCore is out because it is an open source project and people can’t stop talking about it.

As Apple’s public schedule for WWDC explained, “SproutCore is an open source, platform-independent, Cocoa-inspired JavaScript framework for creating web applications that look and feel like Desktop applications. Learn how to combine SproutCore with HTML5’s standard offline data storage technologies to deliver a first-class user experience and exceptional performance in your web application.”

A bit more here.

All the reliability of Windows XP and the affordability of Apple hardware: Citrix

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During Adobe’s Q2 earnings call Monday, chief Shantanu Narayen said that Adobe had tackled some of the technical challenges to getting Flash to work on the iPhone:

We have a version that’s working on the emulation. This is still on the computer and you know, we have to continue to move it from a test environment onto the device and continue to make it work. So we are pleased with the internal progress that we’ve made to date.

The problem is, what runs fine on the emulator may very well be dog-slow on the device itself. Is there any mobile device where Flash is snappy? Anyway, DaringFireball says it best:

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The funny part is that when I loaded this page on my Mac, I was presented with one of the most obnoxious Flash-based web ads I’ve ever seen: an ad for Verizon FiOS that, about 10 seconds after the page loaded, “set fire” to the paragraph of text I was reading. The iPhone’s lack of Flash is a feature.

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The 3G iPhone will be available to both contract customers, based on particularly simple price plans, and to pay-as-you-go users, and will include a wide range of data offerings. By choosing a contract price plan, such as iPhone Vodafone Facile, it will be possible, for example, to have an Apple phone at a particularly attractive price. People preferring a pre-pay plan for private users can buy the 8Gb iPhone for €499 or the 16GB model for €569.