Couple of weeks back, Dad’s friend’s iphone started behaving a wierdishly and he by mistake hit the restore button on the iTunes! It went back to locked conditions and he asked me to look into it. I had unlocked this phone around Feb when his son sent it as a gift to him from the US. I had used Ziphone (took only 5 mins to unlock!) and thinking it would be a no brainer, I took up the issue.

But after one full day trying to poke around I was clueless and frustrated. I attacked the problem the next day and I seemed to have gone nowwhere! Afraid that the phone might have bricked, I gave it one last shot to restore it and phew I successfully managed to do it. Its was frustrating for me to actually diagnose the problem and solve it as I had no idea what the uncle did & I had not followed iPhone developments.

Just bloggin this in case someone else faces the problemo ;P. Here it goes …

• If you are getting error 20 (Version you are trying to load is older than the one you already have) check if you are really on DFU.(nice instructions there)

To put your phone in recovery mode simply:

1. Switch off the iPhone.
2. Hold the home button as you connect your iPhone to your PC/Mac.
3. Continue to hold the home button untill you see the iTunes/Dock Cable logo.

To put your iPhone in to DFU mode:

1. Turn on iPhone
2. Connect to PC/Mac
3. Open iTunes
4. Hold down power and home buttons
5. Wait untill red slider appears to shut down iPhone – keep holding the buttons.
6.Wait untill the iPhone shuts down
7. Release power button, keep home button pressed (if the Apple logo appeared you didn’t release the power button quick enough – try again!)
8. Wait about 7 seconds – iTunes should say there is an iPhone connected in “restore mode”

• You will have to install iTunes 7.5 not the latest one! You need to remove all traces latest iTunes completely! Then you need to download 1.1.4 firware and install it (press the shift button when you click Restore to install a specific firmware) You will most likely come across error 1601 or 1602.
• For exact instructions go to these links …
• I had to use iLiberty+ finally to dissect the problem
• Even then I was getting stuck with a problem where I had opened the phone but it was not recognizing the vodafone SIM! Duh, it was more like a iTouch! Final solution came when I understood the crux of the matter was the baseband doesn’t change automatically. You need another software called the KiPhone. One has to do this as people haven’t still figured out how to crack the latest baseband 04.05.04

Hope this helps i.e. savnig time. The 5 minute venture last time turned out to be 3 days of effort ;P Mainly stalled due to pathetic download speeds. Who says experience helps!

Figure just for illustration borrowed it from the FaceBook News feed.

Just read Fred’s article Vibrancy of the online Social Space and wrote a comment there … given the fact that my blogging is coming down I think I repost the comment to the article as blog post. Some snippets from the article:

as I log in, I am engaged by a cross-section of my social relationships. In an instant, information is revealed, opportunities are discovered, and a website becomes a social nexus – from which I can derive a sense of gratification, meaning and identity.

In her 1961 work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs described the sidewalk ballet of a vital urban environment. Jacobs argued that a vibrant and diverse city should possess four characteristic design elements, the first being that a neighborhood should be multifunction, creating activity throughout the day. Next, a city should have short blocks and its buildings should be multiform, creating interest and promoting exploration by inhabitants. Finally, Jacobs argued for density, in which different populations intersperse, affording variety and shared resources.

Applying Jacobs’ criteria to an online space creates a challenge; as a neighborhood jumps from the physical to the virtual, the nature of its goods changes.

Arguing for shorter blocks, Jacobs felt that this type of design would foster exploration by city dwellers. The “short blocks” analogy is alive and well in online social networks, where the ability to browse and explore fellow network participants fuels use. In a social network, we enumerate our identity as we describe our interests, tag each other, and post on walls and message boards. These “digital traces” are often hyperlinked, permitting endless point-and-click exploration of the social space.

Indeed, online social networks are concentrated; in this sense they are unlike any neighborhood. Social networks allow for the centralization of one’s network in a single place; geographic boundaries are rendered insignificant as we connect across place and time. The social network allows the work friends to intermingle with grade school friends in an odd, often awkward dance.

In a study conducted at Michigan State University (Lampe, 2006), researchers found that friendships in social networks often began offline and migrated online, rather than the other way around.

The social cost of relationship maintenance decreases; the birthday card is replaced with a wall post. We can certainly lament the depersonalization of online interaction, but we can’t impugn the outcome – we are able to manage larger collections of friends with less effort than ever before. Do these extended friend networks increase sociality or simply introduce new digital tethers to our social life? That is a question we’ll work towards answering, as the effects of these digital publics on our real world is explored.

We flirt, we interact, we do business, we seek out information and gratification, finding a complex social world at our fingertips. While the digital spaces we inhabit will have a good deal in common with our cities of concrete and granite, they are unique places with unique challenges. While the technological emphasis of relevance and searchability will create new types of interactions online, it would be wise for developers to pay attention to Jacbos; they will find both the meaning and the letter of her laws instructive.

My comments:

Fred … nicely written will read this again and hopefully get back with more thoughts. From my personal experience, I see myself making more friends either in the offline or real world and enriching the boards in social networking sites like playing a game of scrabble or doing fun stuff.

However, I make more chance exploration kind of encounters in communities like Flickr and Flickr communities and special niche communities for like minded topics. When we have meetups – I like the interaction and then choose to go online hoping to find the people I liked online and grow the bond richer.

I have never come across party like behaviour in the online space. And yes, I haven’t tried second life as the bandwidth is very less in India. (Feel frustrated about that once I moved back from the Bay Area.)

But, there is one thing you should consider: the influence of the mobile and information convergence it brings on! It was also very interesting to see Steve Jobs showcasing facebook’s beta iPhone site What happens as a next step as your social internet sphere moves with you on the go. What happens in countries like India and other where majority of population in a year or two is going to experience SNS primarily through the mobile??

I am just putting a screen shot from couple of applications to aid your thought process of the visualization of my facebook social sphere. Remember its going to be only 3 months I am on facebook and I am loving it completely. I have around 225 contacts on facebook and around 375 contacts on orkut – all decently meaningful ones so that my interactions there don’t get diluted!

The looks are there and the price is there! You may decide to buy the thing for the pinch and flick and the lovely screen.

But I think I will either wait for the iphone or wait for a more feature packed iPodTouch! I agree with VitaminCM here on most accounts. The list of feature I want to see more in the iPod Touch are:

• Two small cameras – a 1M in the front and a 3M in the back
• Can make video voice calls!
• Capture moments and ditch the camera
• Also cut and make videos on the go – nokia ain’t that good!
• Open the damn platform and give api’s for the touch and accelorometers – there are so many lovely things to be done.
• Apple is still thinking these things are MP3 players and computers
• we are nearing convergence damit – open the shit!
• Wireless USB and Bluetooth
• The market this year and the next is going to explode with wireless usb products – keyboards, monitors, webcams etc ….
• GPS – with map integration
• Blogging tools!
• 40GB memory! (you have 160Gb on one extreme and a mere 8Gb on the other!)

I probably the logical explanations on why apple is slowly taking a back door entry to iPhone like device. it was also nice to see steve showing facebook’s iphone version on the keynote. Lovely right?

The day Apple releases the above specs in the iPod Touch for $300 or Rs 12k-15k I am gonna buy it even if it doesn’t have a phone on it! Else I would be happy to check it out in the apple store or borrowing it from my friend …. Jobs make me want more … the new iPods suck any way!!! and release the leopard out the cage faaaast! roar …. Anyway – the buy statement always holds

A post on mobile and India after a really long time. Interest got rekindled after reading the lovely interview on Indian @ Wharton with ISB’s Ravi Bapna (I gotta mail him) and Stern’s Arun Sundarajan on Spectrum revenues and Infrastructure subsidy. Excerpts from the interview:

looks like the infrastructure rollout costs over the next few years to get to that target of a few hundred million subscribers are going to be on the order of a minimum of $20-25 billion. But the flipside is that the revenue opportunity is actually extremely large given the numbers.

You don’t know how these things unfold. The rural segment could well surprise us in terms of the usage. Of course, there is a big market for micro credit, for insurance and for all kinds of services to get out there.

I think the more important issue is that the Defense Ministry and the Telecommunications Ministry need to really sit down together — perhaps under the aegis of the Prime Minister’s office — and take this as a national priority and resolve the issues. I think that is the key issue, and I think once that gets held, the spectrum should get rolled out. The operators are ready. Talking to them, they are just waiting for the regulatory “cholesterol” to sort of disappear and they want to start making money.

As Ravi mentioned, there are at least three layers here. You’ve got device manufacturers. You’ve got infrastructure and service providers. And you’ve got content providers. And unless there is a strong enough belief among the content providers that there’s going to be sufficient infrastructure fast enough, the content is not going to appear. If the content does not appear, the value of the infrastructure as perceived by the consumer is lower.

Nokia has a big manufacturing facility now, and they are trying to look at ethnographically how people in emerging markets would use the phone differently. So, things that they can learn from [India] probably would translate well into other emerging markets all over the world.

Overall, I think the picture looks good on these fronts. But getting these three or four key constituencies aligned in one direction, particularly the content side and fostering innovation …

and then just mentioning a bit about the iPhone – this review from the BBC and Engadget sums it up!! Excerpt from the BBC review:

Apple’s claim that the iPhone is five years ahead of any other mobile is nonsense, in terms of actual tech specifications. In particular, the antiquated data system lets it down badly. However, as a user experience it is probably about 10 years ahead.

Using the iPhone makes you feel quite angry towards other mobile manufacturers. What have they been doing? Fobbing us of with such truly awful interfaces?

However, I am conscious that where we do benefit on other platforms is the wealth of third party applications. If Apple could sort out the camera, data speed and keyboard the iPhone would still not be perfect, but it wouldn’t be far off.

Quote of the day from OM:

The strategy is typical of Apple: it lets the market reach a point of confusion, and then starts offering a service that emphasizes ease of use and elegant out of the box experience.

My favourite topic – media, gadgets and trends and spice it up with some apple thrashing / defense Will phones replace iPods? Head over to Communities dominate brands for some excellent defense I just loved these 1 2 3 posts …

Some arguments I would like to highlight …

Digital cameras vs camera phones:

Game over. Two of the four are already dead. Why are Canon and Nikon only reporting 30% and 20% growth? If there was any strong market for cameras, they would pick up all of Minolta-Konica’s customers (and be up at least 50%). When two of the world’s largest manufacturers of the industry totally quit, thats a pretty strong sign that the time for that technology is over. Cameraphones today offer 5 Megapixel resolutions, 3x optical zooms, 20x digital zooms, built-in flashes etc. Its not ever going to replace the professional digital camera – the wedding photographer will not show up with a Motorola – but this is a point the camera industry admitted in 2004 – they lost the battle.

iPods, US and musicphones:

The actual current state of musicphones is very alien to those who commented. As most of them tend to be from America, it is to be expected. By accident of timing, the iPod is best selling in North America, and cellphones (including musicphones) are least advanced in America. So what is quite common in Asia or Europe with more advanced cellphones, cellular networks, and wireless carriers, may still seem like impossible for many Americans.

Facts:

So please bear in mind that the FACT of the drop in sales in iPods from 14.1 million to 8.5 million to 8.1 million comes from Apple numbers, and the 40% drop have been confirmed by Apple COO on April 19 and the further 6% drop confirmed by Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer.

Lovely ending!

And we also want to be responsive to all. It does go to the very heart of the topic of this blogsite and our book, that Communities Dominate. We want to engage with you.

And yeah taking it in the Indian context – a place where iPod has permeated to a decent extent thanks primarily to the underground market. I doubt whether the Indian consumer will really go for it! FM is seen as integral part of a phone and digital cameras -  most of them are seeing it thanks only to the feature in a phone .. ha ha! The canons and nikons has missed a huge market … zombies. Canon doesn’t even have a good support / repair center. My DSLR’s lens stopped working and the repair charge was apparently what I paid for buying it in the US … blame me

Leander Kahney writes on Wired.com – “Why I love Apple”. Amazingly good observation. I think this is one of the reasons I have actually believe me ‘empathy’ when I use apple products. Even if my mac does hang (yes it does sometimes) its like – man I was running too many applications !! I think its all about user experience – attention to detail + beauty embbed seamlessly. Leander says:

While I was adjusting the width of the columns, I noticed that the
date changes format depending on the width of the column. If the column
is wide, the date is displayed as “February 27, 2006.” But if you
narrow the column, the date changes to a shorter format: “Feb 27,
2006.” If you narrow the column even further, the date format changes
to the shortest format possible: “2/27/06.”

In addition, the time an e-mail message is received is also
displayed — if there’s room. If the column is narrowed, the time
disappears altogether.

And almost all of Apple’s products display these touches. There’s
the iPod’s slick scroll wheel that accelerates down a long list of
songs the longer you turn it; iChat’s phone icons that exactly match
your model of phone; the instructions for adding more RAM printed
inside the machine’s casing; or the light around a PowerBook’s A/C
power cord that tells you if the batteries are charging or fully topped
up.

Not all of Apple’s products are like this, of course (Aperture jumps
to mind), but most of them are. They generally display an astonishing
– almost fanatical — attention to detail that makes them not just
easy to use, but a pleasure.

Other companies do this too. IBM’s ThinkPads are marvels of clean,
sturdy engineering; Nokia’s cell-phone interfaces nicely anticipate the
user’s intentions. Even Microsoft’s Xbox 360 interface is pretty slick.

But again and again, Apple delights with its focus on the user
experience. Its engineers and programmers obviously work through every
aspect of how the product will be used, and refine it until they get to
the slightest detail — like matching the date format to the width of
the column.

Check out the MSNBC interview with Steve Jobs, I loved his final remarks about himself:

Well, I'm a private person. I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next.

For now, in a tough business and in a tough town, the Apple store in midtown
Manhattan is what's next. That is, until the next thing comes along.

Another new category open called ” today ” – has news from today that I consider to be important from my point of view!

Media
The Walt within: Did Disney buy Pixar or Jobs??

Mobile:
Marketing mobiles to the youth segmenet
Location based marketing for mobiles

some fun:
The Malt PC

{I love this concept !} instructions to mod it here.

The Fon Buzz: About Fon
The net blogosphere is all talking about it. I feel its going to be important from the developing word point of view. especially India and Africa
Ethan Zuckerman says:

In Africa, bandwidth isn’t cheap. Entire universities run on less bandwidth than I have coming into my house on a DSL line. Being altruistic and leaving your wireless access point open in Africa is pretty much a guarantee that you’re going to end up with other users abusing the limited bandwidth you have. It’s important that African users have the opportunity to share their bandwith in a way that allows for “bandwidth shaping” – sharing some bandwidth with other users and retaining the rest for your own needs – and billing, so other users can share the cost with you. FON’s current software isn’t optimized for this situation yet, but it’s close, and FON is engaged with the issues in a serious and sustained way. I predict that FON is something I’ll be able to enthusastically pitch to African friends in the very near future.

Here are the thoughts of GigaOm and Mobile-Weblog

Indian Daily – Business Line covers this news saying:

`Why Fon?’ thus: “Broadband growth continues; WiFi is rapidly disseminating; WiFi devices are rapidly proliferating; VoIP is becoming mainstream; users want fixed Internet everywhere.”

Are there enemies of Fon? Yes! “Mobile operators have paid enormous amounts of money for 3G licences and they want the return on their investment. But they don’t have the bandwidth to compete with WiFi,” points out Varsavsky.

This is the first of the three post on my experiences with Media and Computers over the past decade.

Media and computers have been a big part in my life especially after entering college in 1998.

Apart from getting independence, more time to goof off, college is a place where ‘like‘ minded people of your age meet! I was averaging around one movie a week in the theatres in the first two years. With the cheapest ticket being Rs 6.50! for 3 hours of a/c (its freaking hot and humid in madras), it was really well worth it even if the movie was not good ha ha those days are amazing to think of!

Rewind 7 years back – 1998

The dorms in IIT were a valuable resource – technical and more of an enjoyment resource. Computers were just becoming cheaper then. A pentium III box in 1998 was around Rs 50,000. Luckily someone in my wing had bought a kick ass computer with a DVD drive, a 17 in monitor and of course 2 good speakers. No internet and of course no intranet! But yeah, those days that itself was a real luxury – almost like a supercomputer in my wing! Apart from a bit of programming and simulation, main purpose of the machine was the ‘multimedia’! It was the entertainment juke box.

!STOP!

If anyone reading this is still thinking or has bought a computer now thinking only of its business use and value for money. I recommend you stop reading this and go do something really really useful. But just before you go, remember this – either you don’t belong to the current generation or else you are missing the boat soon! F5 – Refresh and Continue

Fast forward – present 2005

Take a snap shot of anyone’s computer disk space now. Typically this is how it is distributed. 10% OS!! 30% needed free space, 20% actual data and then 40% MUSIC and PICS! For heavy duty media users like me – we prefer either a network drive or an external hard drive! I have a 320GB external hard disk and I have only 18.5 17GB hard disk free space left on it! On top of it I have around 30 personal data DVDs. Given a choice, I will easily consume 1 TB of space (money is a constraint! ).

more continued in the next post tomm . Next I shall be talking more on the accerated growth groth of use in my junior and senior year. With the third posting finally talking about my experiences at Berkeley and US… good night ye all! and yeah, as any computer enthusiast, here is my snap shot of my desktop (its a mac mini):