Vishal Kothari

Nokia has just made an announcement to launch it’s version of Touchscreen handsets to compete with the iPhone. Nokia remained coy about the widely-rumoured device, codenamed Tube.

Nokia’s senior vice president Soren Petersen said consumers wouldn’t have to wait long for the handset. “We will have touchscreen devices coming this year, and that’s about all I’ll say on that one.”

Petersen deflected criticism that Nokia has been slow to respond to the iPhone. “We are a big company, we are a platform-based company, which means, annoyingly, we do things very steadily and very solidly,” he said.

The following statement took me by surprise though:

“We will be selling, next year, half a billion phones. Something for us that sells eight or ten million [Apple's 2008 target figure for the iPhone] wouldn’t be that big a splash.”

I don’t think that would be a realistic figure to achieve, specially when you have a competitor like Apple at the other end. Because what is selling in the iPhone is not the hardware, but the software.

And by the time this phone comes out, if Apple is planning to drop down the price of iPhone at $199 (Rs. 8000), then every other person would have an iPhone for sure.

It will be exciting to see how these companies compete & what do they have to offer us.

I got the opportunity to play around for a week with the iPhone 8gb model. And it was a wonderful experience.

I did all kind of stuff, starting from installing new software’s to reinstalling 1.1.4.
I would like to post a few useful tips, which can be found at many places if you are encountering problems with your iPhone.

I installed Summerboard while I was installing many other applications. And after installing Summerboard, it hanged. It used to start, but none of the applications used to open, neither was I able to uninstall it. That’s when I had to reinstall 1.1.4.

Learnt how to unlock it. I was using a Macbook & unlocked it through Ziphone. The steps were simple. Remember, these are for Mac OS:

1.Downloaded Ziphone on my Macbook
2.Connected the iPhone to the Macbook through USB cable
3.Connect your iPhone to the computer and make sure iTunes detects it. Leave iTunes open.
4.You can now activate, jailbreak, and unlock! Just simply select the Do it all! box. Then click the Start Process button.
5.It will start the process, then once it’s completed after about 3-4 minutes, reboot the iPhone and that’s it.

Find the above guide here: http://www.unlockappleiphone.com/2008/unlock-iphone-ziphone-25-gui-mac/

I had to do this twice in the process of installing applications. I won’t ever install Summerboard again though.

Also I had tried to install a few patches from some unknown & unreliable sources, after installing them, the iPhone started behaving weird. It wouldn’t play any sound, including ringtones, the phone used to work with some pause in between, etc. I deleted those patches and it was fine.

Overall, it was a nice experience. Something different & out of the box, as Apple always does it.