Before you go and get one, please be aware that the iPhone 4 only works with micro-SIM cards. So, make sure with the operator you choose that they have a micro-SIM card.

According to some sources, this offer is not only for iPhone 4 but also will be applied for the next generation of iPhones. So, Apple is not doing this to get rid of old stock before the next iPhone comes out for sure. And also as long as i know, unlocked iPhones are in great demand worldwide and those markets which sell them are often out of stock.

Well, let’s hope that this will be applied not for US Apple Store but also for other places around the world. Seems like this is one of Apple’s efforts to expand it’s iPhone sales to compete with Android. The only question is probably why it took so long for Apple to do this.

Check out on the Apple Store!

So, what does it mean? In Windows Phone, Microsoft tried to offer functionality as built-in features giving faster and more convenient access to those features accordingly. While Apple through the iOS offers functionality as an app. However, this approach has been used by Apple since the first time iPhone launched. And seems that Apple has been doing great job on this if we looking at the App Store.

Well this fact really gives an impression as if Windows Phone has better features set overall compared to iOS. But at the end, it’s the market who will judge which one has the better offer.  So, who do you think is better?

[via: winphone7.info]

There’s no specific info regarding devices or iOS version that will be supported by this JailbreakMe 3.0. However, you could possibly expect to see the iPad 2 iOS 4.3.3 jailbreak which is not yet supported by other jailbreak tools like RedSn0w, PwnageTool and Sn0wbreeze. It’s also interesting to see whether the JailbreakMe will also support the new iOS 5 which the beta developer version has been early jailbroken recently.

When iPad 2 arrived 3 months ago, Comex has revealed that he successfully jailbroken it, but then Apple fix the iPad 2 jailbreak vulnerability in iOS 4.3.1.

For those who don’t know, JailbreakMe is the easiest iOS jailbreaking process ever released. All you need to do is to point your Mobile Safari browser to the JailbreakMe.com website. You’ll be presented with “slide to jailbreak” bar and once you do that, the JailbreakMe will do the rest of the process online.

[via: Twitter]

OmniVision has grabbed a majority of total CMOS image sensor (CIS) orders placed by Apple for the fifth-generation iPhone, market sources have claimed. Meanwhile, power amplifier (PA) supplier Avago Technologies has landed orders for the WCDMA version of the device for its first time, according to the sources.

About 90% of the CIS orders for Apple’s new iPhone will be supplied by OmniVision, while Sony takes up the remainder, the sources said. The upcoming device will feature a built-in 8-megapixel camera, the sources added.

Thanks to the Apple orders, OmniVision is expected to grow its total wafer starts at foundry partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to almost 260,000 8-inch equivalent units in the third quarter, up more than 40% sequentially, the sources indicated.

Well, it’s not about the OmniVision or Sony since OmniVision has been known as Apple’s prime supplier of CMOS sensors for iOS devices. But people love to hear rumors these days and until the official announcement of the iPhone 5 or whatever is the name will be, you can expect to see more to come.

[via: Digitimes]

This jailbreak is a tethered boot only which means you need to connect the iOS device to your computer on every reboot. And of course, this is not the final jailbreak as it used the iOS 5 beta developer which was distributed couple of hours after the iOS 5 announcement yesterday.

According to MuscleNerd, Cydia appears to be working fine on the jailbroken iPod touch 4G and he also managed to install SSHing utility app called iSSH successfully.

So, Apple still have couple of months until they release the final iOS 5 to the public later this fall. But i’m sure it won’t take long time for the iOS underground community to see the iOS 5 jaibreak once again.

“Today it is a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your devices,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into our apps you don’t even need to think about it—it all just works.”

The iCloud will be available this fall together with iOS 5. iOS 5 users can sign up for iCloud for free and will get 5GB of free cloud storage for Mail, Document Storage and Backup. Read the full press release of the iCloud announcement below.

Apple Introduces iCloud

Free Cloud Services Beyond Anything Offered to Date

SAN FRANCISCO—June 6, 2011—Apple® today introduced iCloud®, a breakthrough set of free new cloud services that work seamlessly with applications on your iPhone®, iPad®, iPod touch®, Mac® or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and automatically and wirelessly push it to all your devices. When anything changes on one of your devices, all of your devices are wirelessly updated almost instantly.

“Today it is a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your devices,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into our apps you don’t even need to think about it—it all just works.”

The free iCloud services include:

• The former MobileMe® services—Contacts, Calendar and Mail—all completely re-architected and rewritten to work seamlessly with iCloud. Users can share calendars with friends and family, and the ad-free push Mail account is hosted at me.com. Your inbox and mailboxes are kept up-to-date across all your iOS devices and computers.
• The App Store™ and iBookstore℠ now download purchased iOS apps and books to all your devices, not just the device they were purchased on. In addition, the App Store and iBookstore now let you see your purchase history, and simply tapping the iCloud icon will download any apps and books to any iOS device (up to 10 devices) at no additional cost.
• iCloud Backup automatically and securely backs up your iOS devices to iCloud daily over Wi-Fi when you charge your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Backed up content includes purchased music, apps and books, Camera Roll (photos and videos), device settings and app data. If you replace your iOS device, just enter your Apple ID and password during setup and iCloud restores your new device.
• iCloud Storage seamlessly stores all documents created using iCloud Storage APIs, and automatically pushes them to all your devices. When you change a document on any device, iCloud automatically pushes the changes to all your devices. Apple’s Pages®, Numbers® and Keynote® apps already take advantage of iCloud Storage. Users get up to 5GB of free storage for their mail, documents and backup—which is more amazing since the storage for music, apps and books purchased from Apple, and the storage required by Photo Stream doesn’t count towards this 5GB total. Users will be able to buy even more storage, with details announced when iCloud ships this fall.
• iCloud’s innovative Photo Stream service automatically uploads the photos you take or import on any of your devices and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices and computers. So you can use your iPhone to take a dozen photos of your friends during the afternoon baseball game, and they will be ready to share with the entire group on your iPad (or even Apple TV®) when you return home. Photo Stream is built into the photo apps on all iOS devices, iPhoto® on Macs, and saved to the Pictures folder on a PC. To save space, the last 1,000 photos are stored on each device so they can be viewed or moved to an album to save forever. Macs and PCs will store all photos from the Photo Stream, since they have more storage. iCloud will store each photo in the cloud for 30 days, which is plenty of time to connect your devices to iCloud and automatically download the latest photos from Photo Stream via Wi-Fi.
• iTunes® in the Cloud lets you download your previously purchased iTunes music to all your iOS devices at no additional cost, and new music purchases can be downloaded automatically to all your devices. In addition, music not purchased from iTunes can gain the same benefits by using iTunes Match, a service that replaces your music with a 256 kbps AAC DRM-free version if we can match it to the over 18 million songs in the iTunes Store®, it makes the matched music available in minutes (instead of weeks to upload your entire music library), and uploads only the small percentage of unmatched music. iTunes Match will be available this fall for a $24.99 annual fee. Apple today is releasing a free beta version of iTunes in the Cloud, without iTunes Match, for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users running iOS 4.3. iTunes in the Cloud will support all iPhones that iOS 5 supports this fall.

Apple is ready to ramp iCloud in its three data centers, including the third recently completed in Maiden, NC. Apple has invested over $500 million in its Maiden data center to support the expected customer demand for the free iCloud services.

Pricing & Availability
The iCloud beta and Cloud Storage APIs are available immediately to iOS and Mac Developer Program members atdeveloper.apple.com. iCloud will be available this fall concurrent with iOS 5. Users can sign up for iCloud for free on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch running iOS 5 or a Mac running Mac OS® X Lion with a valid Apple ID. iCloud includes 5GB of free cloud storage for Mail, Document Storage and Backup. Purchased music, apps, books and Photo Stream do not count against the storage limit. iTunes Match will be available for $24.99 per year (US only).

iTunes in the Cloud is available today in the US and requires iTunes 10.3 and iOS 4.3.3. Automatic download of apps and books is available today. Using iCloud with a PC requires Windows Vista or Windows 7; Outlook 2010 or 2007 is recommended for accessing contacts and calendars.

Let’s see the new iOS 5 features highlights below:

• Notification Center - this is where you can find all notifications including text messages, missed calls, calendar alerts, app alerts and more, all in one place, from anywhere in iOS 5. However, doesn’t like previous notifications style, this new notifications appear briefly at the top of the screen without interrupting what you’re doing. It also appear on the lock screen. You can swipe to see all notifications and simply tap to take you right to it’s app.
• iMessage – this is probably one of the most awaited features from iOS. The iMessage brings similar functionality with BlackBerry Messenger to iOS devices which enables iOS users send text messages, photos and videos or contact information between all iOS devices including iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Moreover, this works not only through 3G connection but also Wi-Fi which BlackBerry Messenger can’t do. The iMessages are automatically pushed to all iOS 5 devices and includes features like delivery and read receipts, typing indication and secure end-to-end encryption.
• Built-in iOS Twitter Integration – Apple finally brings built-in Twitter integration to iOS enables you to tweet directly from all Twitter-enabled apps like Photos, Camera, Safari, YouTube and Maps once you signed in.
• Newsstand – is a new way to purchase and organize your newspaper and magazine subscriptions.
• Enhanced Safari – now include new features Safari Reader, Reading List and Tabbed Browsing.
• The new Reminders – this app helps you manage your tasks including create and group related tasks together, set time or location-based reminder alerts, priorities and due dates. Reminders can also be viewed in iCal and Outlook and are updated automatically.
• New features in Camera and Photos – this apps give you instant access to the camera right from the lock screen. It also comes with features like crop, rotate, enhance and remove red-eye and more.

In addition to those great features, iOS 5 also brings improvements to Game Center, Mail, AirPlay and a nice system-wide split keyboard for easier typing on iPad. Visit Apple website for more details about iOS 5 new features or read the iOS 5 full press release.

The iOS 5 beta software and SDK are now available for iOS Developer Program members. The iOS 5 official software update for iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 2, iPad, iPod Touch (fourth generation) and iPod Touch (third generation) will be available this fall.

The iOS 4.3.3 update for iPhone (iPhone 4, 3GS, 3G), iPad (iPad 1,2), iPod Touch (2G, 3G, 4G) as well as the Verizon iPhone 4 and AppleTV has been released last week. And it doesn’t take long time for iOS underground community to release the Jailbreak for those updates except the iPad 2 which is not available yet. And here in this post i’ll share the step-by-step guides for iOS 4.3.3 Jailbreak using some popular Jailbreak tools including RedSn0W, Sn0wBreeze and PwnageTool as well as Unlocking guide using UltraSn0w.

And of course you have to download the iOS 4.3.3 firmware files first for your device. Check out this post to find links to download iOS 4.3.3 firmware for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and AppleTV.

Jailbreak iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad, iPod Touch iOS 4.3.3 with RedSn0w – iPhone Dev-team has released the latest version of their jailbreak tool RedSn0w 0.9.6RC15. This tutorial is applied for iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS. However you may also follow the same steps for Jailbreaking iPod Touch 4G/3G as well as iPad 1.

Jailbreak iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch 4G, 3G and iPad with Sno0wbreeze 2.7 – on Sn0wbreeze 2.7, you have to create custom iOS 4.3.3 first and then manually restore it to your iOS devices. Sn0wbreeze 2.7 preserves iPhone baseband so you may unlock iOS 4.3.3 with UltraSn0w after that.

Jailbreak iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad, iPod Touch iOS 4.3.3 with PwnageTool 4.3.3 – this tutorial is for iOS 4.3.3 untethered jailbreak. Like the Sn0wbreeze 2.7, PwnageTool also will preserve the iPhone baseband. However, this only works for Mac users.

Unlock iOS 4.3.3 on iPhone 4, 3GS with UltraSn0w 1.2.3 – if you need to unlock your jailbroken iPhones, you can follow this step-by-steps which supposed to be easy once you get your iPhones jailbroken.

We still don’t see the iPad 2 iOS 4.3.3 jailbreak come out yet. But hopefully it doesn’t take so long. And with the iOS 5 is on the way, i’m sure those jailbreaking folks are already preparing them selves.

The report on the chart above is in Chinese, but more or less it’s translated as below:

• iPhone 4 is the most popular iOS device which is used by 54% of users followed by iPhone 3GS with 16.1% market share.
• Most of iOS devices have been upgraded to iOS 4.1 or above.
• Among those devices, only 27% of iPad are jailbroken.
• iPhone is used mostly in daytime (before 7pm) while after 7pm, users prefer to use iPad.
• 52% of iOS devices are used on major cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, Zhejiang and Jiangsu.

It’s interesting to see that there are high number of users prefer to use jailbroken iOS devices in China eventhough it doesn’t always mean piracy. But im sure that even paid users not only in China but also in other countries play with this iOS jailbreaking and unlocking stuff.

[via: TNW]

In the last couple of days, there has been rumor said that Apple might be delivering over-the-air (OTA) updates for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch in iOS 5. This approach albeit has been using by by competitors like Google’s Android and HP/Palm’s webOS handsets, but relatively new for iOS users who are familiar with the iTunes-based update process during the last few years. The question is, if iOS users are happy to update their devices through the iTunes, so why have to use OTA instead?

Here’s couple of things that probably can give you better understanding upon this plan so you can decide whether you need it or not if Apple really implement that in the future.

PROS

• Currently the iOS update process requires you to get a PC with iTunes and internet connection. Moreover, this PC has to be the one that’s registered with your Apple ID and store your iTunes library including your device backup in order to be able to restore your settings once updated. While with the OTA updates, you can proceed the update process at anytime from anywhere without having to tether to your iTunes PC.
• The iTunes-based update requires full firmware replacement doesn’t matter how small the changes Apple needs to make on the update. It means you have to reload a roughly 500MB firmware files everytime you need to update your iOS. With the OTA updates, Apple have an option to do smaller and more frequent patches when there are security issues or critical bugs found.

CONS

• 3G/cellular data – when you start an OTA update, you are probably somewhere on a location where there’s no Wi-Fi or 3G connections, instead only EDGE or GPRS networks available. That would be a big problem to load the firmware files in that situation. Or probably you only have 250MB data plan which is not enough to even download the firmware file.
• Delays/roll-outs – based on the experience from Google or HP in rolling out OTA updates, it seems like not everyone get the update at once. While the iTunes delivers the update once Apple releases them.
• Restore/Re-syncs – currently iTunes backs up and restore your iOS device while updating the full firmware. So, in addition to load 500MB firmware update, the OTA process also has to carry over-the-air the content backup and then restore it which could be up to 64GB.
• Failed updates – with the iTunes-based update, if the something goes wrong, the worst case is you can still restore from the iTunes backup. While if something goes wrong during the OTA update, your device is completely dead until you can get back to your iTunes PC.

So, OTA updates could be a great service for iOS users in the future as well as for Apple. But of course that’s not a simple thing to implement looking at the number of iOS users. And most importantly, that’s also a big concern for carriers regarding the networks robustness and availability to handle such kind of process.

[via: TiPb]