I just upgraded my version 1 iPhone to firmware version 2.0 using Pwnage, a tool released by the iPhone Dev Team.
The layout of the tool itself, as presented on the screen is very user friendly with lots of hints on what you need to do to upgrade – but still, a nice (short) help file is missing. For example, it could have stated up front that you need certain files and that you need to quit iTunes and iTunes helper (a helper program that runs as a background process). Instead it was mentioned on the page where I downloaded it, but not in the program itself.
As long as you quit iTunes and iTunes Helper (use the activity monitor to find and force quit that process) you should be fine. And as for the bootloader files you need, you can find them on the internet without much problems, and Pwnage will even help you find them (but again, I would have loved to see this mentioned in a help file as the required set list).
After the upgrade from 1.4 to 2.0, which took about 15 minutes in all, my phone seems to be just fine, but a few reminders for those who still need to upgrade :
- After restoring with the custom firmware, you *can* restore your settings – this works great, I haven’t lost my “Notes”.
- Installer.app is not ported, only Cydia is available
- Worse: the applications themselves that are normally available in Cydia/Installer are not there : each application needs to be recompiled/rebuild for the toolchain v2. Apparently this is not such a big deal, but it does need to be done.
- No Summerboard, so no themes ! I already miss my buuf theme !
- The appstore is great, quite a few of nice and usefull programs are free, but when you can see 5 programs, each with a (small) price attached, that one open-source program (Convert, Band) did all together for free, you feel a bit of a let-down.
- Another thing I miss : my own application written in jiggy.app, where you could program via javascript. I had written a program that showed me, depening on the time, the next train to work/home. I’m gonna miss that lil’ol’program, it helped me a lot.
My guess is that open-source authors will release new updated versions via Cydia, as long as they haven’t switched to the appstore.
Even then I would gladly buy a re-release of such a program via the appstore, for example “Convert” : a jailbreak v1.4 app that can convert just about anything into something else. It featured a downloadable list of currencies that you could refresh by shaking it, and has been of regular usage to me.
But so far I haven’t found any appstore converter to my liking, and so far I balk at paying for something I had for free.
We’ll just have to wait and see if Cydia gets more software available in the near future. Meanwhile, I’m looking through the appstore.