Jailbreak my new iPhone 3GS – blackra1n

Anyway, first job, of course, was to jailbreak the new phone. Last time I did it is was… well, it wasn’t a chore, exactly. But it was a bit of pain, using the redsn0w tool from dev-team, on the PC, to modify the firmware update. BUT – brilliant news, an update to an older piece of software called blackra1n which also hacks the iPhone! I hadn’t heard of it before but it appears that it’s been around before for updating older versions of the firmware and I have to admit it was good to have an alternative!

Installation was… well, it was as easy as downloading it and double-clicking the icon! With a connected phone, Click “make it ra1n”, your phone reboots with a funky new wallpaper and then that’s it! You’ve now installed a piece of software called blackrain which is an icon on your phone – open that and you get a number of options to install a software manager, like Cydia.

Problems with blackra1n

HOWEVER, I have a big problem with blackrain because whenever I reboot my phone it keeps asking my to re-activate my phone and plug it into my PC so iTunes can talk to it. Very odd, and clearly not terribly convenient! So if anyone else has this problem with blackra1n please let me know I’m not alone or going nuts.

It’s tricky, I’m very impressed with how easy and quick the jailbreak was with blackrain but clearly this is a big error to have come up every time I reboot my iPhone. Maybe it’ll just sort itself out given a few more reboots, or maybe there’s something in the rebooting that I’m doing wrong and it’s constantly going into recovery mode or something.

First thing I did was activate the MMS. What I didn’t know was that it wasn’t actually activated until I received 2 texts from o2 confirming that *they* have now activated it. Would have been nice for the software to have made that obvious. I got 3 messages from mobile number 1010 describing the situation.

My biggest real gripe though is messaging, either text or web. I think it’s a lot less sensitive than it used to be and harder to navigate text you’ve already written. The “select” tooltip thing keeps coming up when all I want to do is fix badly auto corrected words. Even now I’m finding that I can type faster than the screen can update. This didn’t used to be the case. Sad. Texting is much slower now on the iPhone and much more prone to errors!
I wish so much that apple would have just given us navigation arrows instead – yunno, like all keyboards do!

There are good things, I’m not trying to be a complete killjoy, I just hoped for more. I think it would have been cool for apple to have given us the voice recognition that the 3gs has – not really sure the hardware would hold that back for us.

However – big problem, I downloaded the application update (240MB, by the way) and I got the following error:

———-
The iPhone “………” cannot be updated at this time because the iPhone activation server is temporarily unavailable.
———-

Argh! C’mon Apple – I’ve done some reading around and although I didn’t have an iPhone in 2008, apparently this is not the first time.

The solution to the problem appears to be to close down iTunes (you have to install it using iTunes) and unplug your iPhone. Once you’ve done that, reconnect the iPhone and let iTunes load up by itself. Once it loads it’ll ask you whether you want to install the update – fingers crossed you won’t get the iPhone activation server error.

Phew! So it’s still installing while I blog this. Fingers crossed it’ll all be done soon and I’ll be 3.0ing the heck out of it. So long as there aren’t any more server errors!

UPDATE!!

This courtesy of posted lespaul85

1)Click update
2)immediately disable your network connection (several ways, I just went to my internet properties and my connection and right clicked and went to disable)
3) it’ll skip over the offending error and should continue

Thanks lespaul85, and a big yahoo! from everyone who’s finding this working for them.