andy's nerd blog

Fix for iTunes error 1600 when restoring 3.1.3 to 3GS

Sometimes when trying to restore a custom firmware to an iPhone using iTunes you get hit with an error 1600. There are a variety of causes but in my particular case, I screwed up the phone trying to change fonts and it wouldn’t boot. I turned to google and found about a million threads with various suggestions on how to make it go away. But none of them worked for me.

(There is a handy tool called iReb that will fix this issue for iPhone 2G and 3G, but it doesn’t work for the 3GS.)

And of course Apple stopped signing all previous firmware versions and restoring to official 3.1.3 would update the baseband, making it *currently* un-jailbreakable and unlockable. So, what’s one to do..I tried everything! Well, almost everything…

I was desperate and thought of one last thing to try. I put the phone in DFU mode and started an official 3.1.3 restore. It extracted the software and went to “preparing iPhone for restore.” At this point I saw an Apple logo on the phone. More waiting, and then I saw an empty progress bar appear on the phone. I continued waiting through the “preparing iPhone for restore” stage and the progress bar remained empty. Finally, after what seemed like several minutes the status changed to “waiting for iPhone.” I immediately unplugged the USB cable. The phone then rebooted into Recovery mode (or I rebooted it, don’t recall) but either way I knew that this was a step forward because I couldn’t even get it into Recovery mode before. At this point I force quit iTunes, restarted iTunes, and was able to restore my custom firmware!

The restore completed successfully and my baseband was not updated. Great success! Now I’m not sure if this has been attempted before but I haven’t seen any mention of this anywhere on the interwebz. Try at your own risk of course, but if you need this you’re probably desperate anyway. In that case, hope this helps. At the time of this writing I’ve used this method twice, both with iTunes 9.0.3, once on a Mac and once on Windows. Yes, I’ve been screwing with my phone quite a bit.

My New iPhone Home Screen

The results are in! Seven days later, here’s my new home screen:

And for comparison, here’s the before:

I may rearrange the order over the coming weeks, but otherwise this is what I’m going to keep. (In fairness I did use a few other apps over the course of the week, like Cydia and TripTracker, but decided not to move them because they aren’t apps I use on a regular basis.)

I must say it’s been a somewhat surprising exercise. There were seven apps on my home screen that weren’t being used regularly: Contacts, Maps, Weather, Mint, Pandora, Shazam, and Settings!

I’m not that surprised about Contacts. Some people like it but I find it redundant. Maybe I’m too much of an iPhone old-timer but I get to my contacts via the Phone app out of habit. I am surprised about Settings though. In theory it makes perfect sense to keep it on the home screen but it turns out I hardly use it. That is most likely because my phone is jailbroken and has SBSettings, which I use obsessively.

iPhone Home Screen Experiment

Minimal Mac had a nice idea two weeks ago for discovering which apps should be on his home screen. I decided to duplicate the experiment. On Tuesday I cleared all of the apps on my home screen, except for the Phone, Messages, Mail and Safari icons in the Dock. (I agree that those four should not be moved in principle, but find they are by far my most commonly used apps anyway.) Over the course of the week, any time I use an app I move it to the home screen. After seven days, I’ll see what I have!

For reference, here’s what my home screen looked like before:

And here’s where I am after two days:

There are already three apps that I didn’t have on my home screen before!

WordPress 2 for iPhone

Not sure how I missed this but if you use the WordPress iPhone app make sure you have the 2.0 release. I’m perplexed at why they did it this way since both versions are free but they made version 2 a new app. In either case, just got it and it is way better than the original!

Visit this Link ➚

SimpleNote for iPhone

No news here, I’ve been using this for several months and typically find it indispensable.

Visit this Link ➚

droid doesn’t

Well, that was quick. After making the following pro/con list I returned the Droid. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Android though and hopefully 3.0 matched with a white knight device will be much more compelling. At the same time I’m sure Apple will improve iPhone, though as of yet we haven’t really heard anything about what’s coming in 2010!

Motorola Droid vs. Apple iPhone

Pros:
Google Voice integration in dialer
Screen is beautiful and has a ton of pixels
Navigation works well, especially with voice car mode
Wifi/Bt/GPS toggles built-in via home screen widget, no need to jailbreak
App multitasking built-in and somewhat effective
Notification system is better, shows more than just the most recent notification
Better integration with G services, Gmail app is great, calendar and talk
More reliable network and better call quality
You can see the entire screen while typing with the physical keyboard and it has useful arrow keys
Universal click and hold sub-menu access is nice
Quick access to recently used applications by holding home button
Universal back button is useful
Widgets are helpful
Can potentially modify lock screen

Cons:
Big, heavy and brick-like in appearance
Physical keyboard is not very good and doesn’t offer word correction
Cut and paste is cumbersome
Can’t use mobile data during a call
Camera app is slow and camera itself isn’t up to snuff
Limited to 3 home screens
No syncing of music, pictures, videos or bookmarks!
YouTube low quality option is too low quality and high quality option is too slow on 3G
Not enough granularity in media volume settings
No Yelp app and very basic Facebook app
Also, no ability to receive notifications from Facebook
App store is quite a ways behind in quality and selection
Built-in media player is weak
UI frequently seems slow
No pinch zooming in built-in apps like web browser and photo gallery

droid does?

Note: I wrote this last Wednesday.

I’ve been in a place for several months now where in order to be happy with my 3G iPhone I’ve had to jailbreak. The two primary reasons are SBSettings and MusicControls but I also use GV Mobile for Google Voice, the tethering hacks and Backgrounder. There are many other potential benefits but beyond those the device pretty much slows to a crawl. Technically, a 3GS would solve my problems because of the more powerful hardware. But not only is the upgrade prohibitively expensive, it would also likely require a 2-year extension of my AT&T contract. Not to mention that they can be tougher/riskier to jailbreak.. and that jailbreaking in and of itself may not be around forever.

For these reasons I felt compelled to try out the new Motorola Droid. I’ve always liked Android and have been attracted to the platform because I rely on so many of Google’s services.

Some of the potential benefits:

• Verizon over AT&T
• Better notification system
• Google Voice integration and more
• Multitasking

A few of the biggest complaints against the Droid don’t really affect me. Regarding the 256MB app storage limit; I hardly ever play games. The weakness of the built-in media player app; I don’t use my iPhone for video and music much in lieu of Pandora. The weakness of the Android Market may be an issue though. I rely quite heavily on apps like Touchpad, Prowl and Yelp. In any case, it won’t hurt to give it a try!

Visit this Link ➚

Griffin Simplifi

Hated that the 3G iPhone didn’t come with a dock. Not a big fan of desk clutter but sync cable and leaving iPhone wherever it ends up on the desk is almost worse. I had an Apple Universal Dock for a while but never used the remote or line out thus I couldn’t justify the cost. Did a little digging and turned up this solution. It’s an SD/MMC etc card reader, iPhone/iPod dock and powered USB hub that somewhat maintains the Apple aluminum style.

It isn’t perfect but I actually like it quite a bit. First of all, in many of the reviews I read people mistakenly say it adds one USB port. It’s such simple math I don’t understand why they’re getting this wrong. It will add two USB ports to your desk. Previously I would connect a USB sync cable to my computer, using one USB port. Now I connect the Simplifi to my computer, using one USB port and can still connect two other devices to the back of it. Since I only have 3 USB ports in my MacBook Pro this is a nice benefit and part of the reason why I bought it.

Another one of the complaints were the horribly bright blue LED’s on the front and back. They were terrible and we’ll never know why they didn’t use white. Oh well. I cracked it open the day I got it and replaced them with white LED’s I had in my toolbox. Problem solved.

Also, though it has a rubbery base it doesn’t grip the desk as well as I would like. I put a little bit of double-stick tape underneath it to fix that. If you don’t want it to be too grippy you can stick the tape on your shirt first to dust it up a little bit.

The final complaint is that it doesn’t charge an iPhone or iPod unless it’s plugged into a computer, even though the unit has its own power. This is more complicated to fix so I just live with it. Definitely annoying though since I use a laptop and not a desktop pc.

Otherwise, I’m happy with it. It matches the look of my Cinema Display and through the use of Apple’s dock adapters supports nearly every iPod device. It can be difficult to remove SD cards once inserted into the reader (since it doesn’t have a spring mechanism) but whatever, I don’t use them that often. And at $40 it was just $10 more than the ExpressCard card reader I was about to buy for my MacBook Pro. So for a dock, 2-port USB hub and card reader it isn’t a bad value.

Here’s what it looks like after my white LED mod:

Visit this Link ➚

NumberKey

Haven’t used this yet but it looks pretty nifty.. Turn your iPhone or iTouch into a keypad for when you’re on your laptop or numpad-less keyboard. Supports windows but requires a desktop app and a shared wifi connection. There’s a free version in the app store to try.

Visit this Link ➚

New MobileConfig for AT&T 3.1.2 Tethering

Requires the patched CommCenter… Enables tethering but doesn’t break VVM!

Visit this Link ➚