This is the first real augmented reality application on the iPhone 3GS. It uses the compass and tilt sensors to automatically turn the view of the night sky and shows the corresponding information.

It seems minimally buggy, especially when the tilt reaches certain angles, but it is an awesome proof-of-concept and shows what is possible with this hardware. After you see this, it’s easy to imagine other augmented reality applications, which also use the camera for additional input.

Soon, people will have this second layer of information at their fingertips. Now if only someone would bring out something like this for the iPhone….

First and foremost, if you are used to the older 3G hardware, the speed and responsiveness will blow you away. There is no more lag, not even when playing some of the more graphics intensive games, the keyboard got rid of those annoying hangs and the new oleophobic touch screen stays much cleaner.

The second thing that blew me away was the user interface for the camera. Touch to focus works amazing.

The compass seems to work even better than the digital compass on my Garmin Oregon handheld GPS. The GPS reciever itself is as good or bad as in the previous model.
The iPhone OS itself is a solid improvement and optimization. Copy and paste seems to work great. I did not have many opportunities to test it, but it was handy for copying a strong password from 1password to Safari.

All in all a great device. I can only recommend it to everyone who does not absolutely need a physical keyboard (besides, the touch keyboard allows different layouts for muli-language users like myself).

I’ll post more in-depth comments later on. Most of this article was written on my iPhone via the Wordpress App, which does not seem to work correctly with the current Wordpress version – does anyone know about that or is that an error on my part?

Anyway, life was great and I was happy. I even bought the 20$ addon pack with the improved applications and the multipage home screen.

Then I read lots about the jailbreaking and that it was so easy to get good third party apps on my device, so I gave it a try.

First, I tried the Ziphone unlock, because “It’s so easy a caveman could do it!”. Well, a stone age cave man certainly would know what to do with the iBrick I had after trying this program. I, however, restored itto non-jailbroken pristine condition after approximately 10 minutes of cursing and freaking out.

An unfortunate combination of reinstalling my computer from scratch without using time machine and resetting the iTouch also led to the situation where I thought I had lost the 20$ app pack for good. Fortunately, Apple support was kind enough to allow me to download it again…

Anyway, after this desaster I tried the other simple jailbreak: PwnageTool. This works by running the jailbreak not on the device itself, but by modifying the firmware:

1. Get the original firmware (direct links via TUAW)
2. Prepare the device to accept the modified firmware (single click “iPwner” in the PwnageTool)
3. Let the PwnageTool modify the firmware (you can even set some custom options for the iPhone) and get a coffee, this may take some time
4. Load the modified firmware onto the device (option click restore to get the selection dialog)
5. Done. Enjoy the glory of Installer.app and try to create something like this: iPhone ad song