Ok, picture this, your traveling around this grand brown land of ours and your desperate for a wireless hotspot? How do you know where to go? The answer is http://iphone.spotigo.net (only works on the iPhone). This great site allows you to enter either a city or postcode and it will display all the local wireless hotspots in your immediate area. You can even choose to just have it list free or paid services if you want.

The service is global, so will also give you hotspots whenever you travel. This is now a permanent bookmark for me and I’m sure will be for many of you who travel as well.

What many people reading here will probably not know is that I am half deaf. Due to an incident in my childhood (not inclusive of chainsaws or other sharp implements) I lost just over 50% of my hearing. This has created numerous issues of the years that have caused me to sound like my grandfather as I yell “Turn it up!”

The iPhone, like many phones out there, doesn’t have the loudest speaker volume. Don’t get me wrong, it is more than adequate for an average user, but for me it is not quite enough. Well last week some daring modders have suggested a very simple yet warrant voiding trick (not that warranties really matter in Aus as we aren’t covered anyway)

To increase the volume all you need to do is pierce the thin plastic that covers the speakers at the bottom of the iPhone with a needle. This simple trick will increase your sound volume by up to 40%!!!

Be warned, this is a major increase in volume and my be too loud for some. But for me, it is a welcome change and I’m not looking back. 

Introducing Krisp. A brand new theme for Summerboard that looks, Krisp. Designed by Jack Rayers, s professional designer, Krisp is sure to excite all iPhone owners, it’s sleek icons can be placed on seemingly real shelves or hung from the wall, all in three different icon placement configurations (using different backgrounds found in the theme file); four rows, three rows or the default Apple configuration of three rows and one icon placed on the right. Krisp comes packaged with three mini themes; Krisp, Krisp Glass and Krisp Reflect, all based on the same custom designed images. Screens hots can be found here. All this for the grand total of nothing thanks to iPhoneAE.com.

Download Here.

Please Note: Although the screen shots give a basic idea of the theme, the theme looks much better when displayed on the iPhone

Installation Instructions:

Copy files to iPhone (using SSH) :  /Library/SummerBoard/Themes

To Change Background (Different icon arrangement, shelves or hanging): In each of the theme files there are six backgrounds, choose which one you want and rename it to ‘Wallpaper.png’

Installer source: COMING SOON

In one of Apples worst kept secrets, the 1.1.3 firmware for the iPhone was released this morning at Macworld. It does everything we expected and a couple of minor new features we did not already know about. Sadly no news on the rumored 3G model or Ausralian release dates.

MAJOR WARNING FOR AUSSIE iPHONE USERS - Don’t Upgrade. This will lock your iPhone. No hack has yet been released. Hopefully in a couple of weeks we will see some news. Keep checking back and we will keep you posted.New features of this update include:

1. Send SMS messages to multiple recipients at once (still not by group though)
2. The 1000 SMS limit is now lifted
3. You can now “pre-type” with two thumbs (i.e. type, type, lift thumb, lift thumb — instead of the usual type, lift, type lift, which is a big slow-down).
4. Gmail IMAP is now officially supported
5. Faux-GPS on Google Maps via mobile tower triangulation
6. Google Maps showing the hybrid map view
7. drag and drop icons on the home screen and bookmarks on the home screen (i.e. Webclips)
8. Videos now can use chapters and subtitles
9. Display lyrics on music when played.

I am a sucker for a good RPG. Just finished Mass Effect on my Xbox for the second time and still occasionally pull out Balders Gate and Diablo when I am feeling sentimental. So image my surprise when I heard today about a web based 3D RPG for the iPhone. Not quite believing it, I checkout out the site.Best of all, it works as advertised.

Yes, we now have “Sunset”, a new RPG created by Donald Hayes. Now the game is not groundbreaking by any means. But considering it is playing via a web page and was created by one man in his spare time, it really needs to be appreciated for what it is. The game has all the hallmarks of a typical RPG: long convoluted story, inventory system, chat dialogues and thankfully a built in save.

So, if you have time to kill, click here and walk into the “Sunset“ 

Looks like Australia is not the only country missing out on the iPhone. It has been well publicised  that Apple had been in close talks with a China Mobile to take the phones into Asia. Today it was announced that those talks have failed.

It is not like this was unexpected though. Reuters noted a while back:

“Analysts had expected talks to fail at least initially, predicting that both parties would eventually lock horns over revenue sharing and a plethora of technical difficulties. Experts said last year that the iPhone would have to navigate a spate of technical, content and fee issues unique to China, including a standard revenue-sharing agreement that China Mobile would be sure to dislike, before any launch could proceed.”

At least China can always depend on the cheap iPhone knock-offs that CECT manufacture. (yes, sadly the image on the right is a real photo of the CECT el-cheapo)

The other day we posted about Google’s new iPhone optimised interface. Well, just in time for Macworld they have released a new version which is faster, cleaner and more finger friendly than ever.  The upgrade has boosted speed, increases the flexibility in arranging tabs and options, adds automatic refresh to the Gmail inbox and brings iGoogle gadgets to the cellphone.

Click here to check it out.

One major missing feature of the Safari browser on the iPhone has been the lack of Flash support. There are many rumored reasons for this, but it is still annoying to us, the end user.Well, is there is a workaround online that allows you to view some Flash content in your browser. It is not true Flash content, but rather content that has been transmogrified. What is transmogrification? Let us explain.

iTransmogrify is actually a Safari iPhone Bookmarklet which replaces the Flash content with a format natively supported by the iPhone (like Quicktime). An example of this might be; if you are looking at a page with youtube content embedded in it, iTransmogrify will replace it with a Quicktime version pulled from YouTube. But this will only work if YouTube has allready stored a version of the clip in Quicktime format on its servers. This also works with mp3’s that might be embedded within a Flash player.

Want to see it in action? Click here for a YouTube demo or just download the iTransmogrify code yourself from www.joemaller.com.

The folks over at Ecamm network the creator of iGlasses, one of my most used utilities, have just released a beta of iPhoneCam that allows for users to stream video from their iPhone camera over Wi-Fi to any Mac video application such as iChat, Photo Booth or Skype. Best of all, they have managed to be ble to get the camera to record at stream at up to 30 fps. Not bad for a camera developed as a still capture only device.

How does it work? Well, the iPhone app and the Mac component find each other using Bonjour (zeroconf). There’s absolutely no configuration necessary. If there’s an iPhone-based camera available, the Mac finds it and uses it automatically. Pretty easy stuff!

Currently the app is in early beta and has a couple of flaws. First, it is video only, no audio. So you will still need separate mic. Also, it is a Mac only app at this point (sorry Windows users..isn’t it time to buy a Mac yet?)

Wan’t to give it a whirl? The click here to try it out. Or, you can click here to see brief movie of the app in action

Are you a Google user? Then you will probably want to check out iGoogle, the new iPhone formatted version of the popular search engine. Like the typical Google page,it can be customised to display various Google widgets including RSS feeds, crosswords, Gmail, etc but is now on a single column tabbed screen.

You can see a demo of it on your computer by clicking here or point your iPhone to http://www.google.com/ig/i