sandyjohnson.net

My journey to find the ultimate home theater / media center experience has taken me down many different paths.  I started out with an original XBOX console running XBMC, then progressed to a Mac Mini running Front Row, then the OSX port of XBMC, then on to Plex, then on to Boxee and finally back to Front Row.

While Front Row may not be the most feature packed and flashy of the programs listed above, I did find it to be the simplest to operate (which always scores huge points with my wife!)

While most of the world was busy rocking in the New Year with the Jonas Brothers and Ryan Seacrest, I and a million other geeks around the world were frantically refreshing the iPhone Dev Team’s Blog in hopes that the long awaited software unlock for the iPhone 3g would be released.

When Apple released the 2.2 firmware for the iPhone, they also updated the baseband (modem firmware) from version 2.11.07 to version 2.28.00. Since YellowSn0w was originally built on the 2.11.07 baseband firmware, the Dev Team strongly recommended against updating to 2.2 (and in turn baseband 2.28.00) if you wanted to use their software unlock upon its release.

On New Year’s Eve, however, the Dev Team began posting cryptic messages that were translated to show that they had successfully hacked the 2.28.00 baseband as well and would be releasing YellowSn0w specifically for that baseband instead of 2.11.07.

From a compatibility standpoint, that sounded like great news! Now everyone could be on the most up to date baseband firmware and still use any GSM carrier they wanted, right? Not necessarily!

Before the software unlock was released, most users (including myself) had been using Proxy Sims to use the iPhone on networks other than AT&T (T-Mobile for me.) A Proxy Sim (for those not wanting to read up) is simply a small paper thin chip that sits between your sim card and the tray that tricks the phone into thinking you are using an authentic sim card belonging to the carrier to which the phone is locked.

The majority of these Proxy Sims (such as the Gevey 3g mentioned in the earlier link) were built to work on the 2.11.07 baseband firmware. So, if you updated to the new baseband firmware, your Proxy Sim would no longer work and you’d be stuck with a much more expensive version of the iPod Touch.

After working on my wife for almost 2 years, she finally caved in October and agreed to let us leave Verizon Wireless to go to AT&T for our very own iPhones.

We left after work one day and traveled over to one of the Auburn AT&T stores.  We were greeted almost instantly by a sales associate who was more than happy to retrieve one 8 gig and one 16 gig iPhone for us.

I wish I had more positive things to say about the buying experience than that, but I don’t.  After the sales associate told us that we would have service at our house, but only 2 or 3 bars at most, he proceeded to begin porting our numbers over from Verizon.

An hour and a half later and after numerous phone calls to Verizon customer service, we were finally presented with our phones.  So how did we wind up on T-Mobile and not AT&T?

I’m coming back slowly…..