Recently in Mobile Phones Category
iPhone 3.0.1 Jailbreak
I decided to spend a bit of time last night jailbreaking my iPhone, using this tutorial on the Gizmodo website - and it all worked perfectly (although one bit missing in the instrucutions is that when the phone says it is “waiting for restart”, you may need to unplug and replug the cable to prompt it onto the next step).
It’s not that I’m particularly interested in installing dozens of unauthorised applications. Indeed, I’m quite happy with all the legit applications I’ve downloaded from the iTunes store. I did the jailbreak in order to unlock the phone and allow me to use another network’s SIM, ahead of an upcoming trip to the UK.
I’ve been stung quite badly in the past by data roaming charges. In one case last year, I had a similar trip to the UK for a week, and while there made only light use of the phone, but still managed to run up a staggering €160 of data roaming charges - based upon a cost of about €5 per megabyte. And although O2 Ireland have improved things slightly since then (you now only get charged for the first 4 megabytes each day while roaming - but still at €5 per megabyte - so a potential of €20 a day), I was still looking at a potential bill of well over €100 worth of data charges if I wanted to use data.
This is in contrast to the domestic data charges of an operator such as Orange, who charge a maximum of £2 per day for up to 25 megabytes usage - and that’s on their prepaid tariff.
And so it was pretty-much a no-brainer, in term of deciding whether or not to get my iPhone unlocked. I’m going to be saving a fortune while I’m away - and as I’ll have my UK SIM in the iPhone, I’ll not have to carry two phones around with me.
August 18, 2009
Multiple Mobiles
Latest figures reveal that mobile phone penetration is at 114%. That is, for every 100 people in Ireland, there are 114 active mobile phones. And if you remove all the young children, elderly, and luddites who don’t have any mobiles, then the ratio of people to phones must be even higher.
It’s easy to understand. Lots of people have separate business and personal mobile phones, and others may subscribe to separate mobile services for different usage patterns.
Myself, I have three different mobile subscriptions that are in regular use, and various other unused (but activated) prepay SIM cards. This may seem like a lot, but you need to consider that I maintain somewhat of a dual telephony lifestyle - with active mobile numbers in both Ireland and the UK. And in addition to the two phones, I also have a mobile broadband subscription for my laptop - although I’m planning to cancel that soon, as I’m not really using it all that much.
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