Do-it-yourself 3G iPhone
I’ve just worked out how you could make a 3G iPhone yourself, even adding GPS support, and still get away with a lower cost than buying a regular iPhone. The solution:
- Get an iPod Touch (from £199).
- Get a Symbian smartphone, such as the N95, with an internet plan (on 3 you’d pay about £34 per month over 18 months for a N95 and a tariff roughly equivalent to O2’s iPhone tariff).
- Download JoikuSpot and install it on the N95. Use it to create an ad-hoc wireless network, and connect the iPod Touch to that network.
- Voilà. Total cost is about £811 over 18 months (compared to the iPhone total cost of £899), you get 3G or even HSDPA, and you get a whole additional handset with Nokia’s awesome features.
JoikuSpot is still a bit limited — rather than just routing packets, it proxies HTTP traffic and doesn’t support anything else, so e.g. IMAP isn’t going to work for the time being. I hope that will get fixed soon. I tested JoikuSpot briefly for plain web traffic on my E65 and it seems to be working.
I’m not going to rush out and buy all those things now, I just find this situation curious.
Can you actually use it as a telephone or is the iphonity reduced to mobile web stuff? And would anyone really do such a complex setup to simulate an iphone, which is famous for its usability after all?
Comment by Johannes — Wednesday, 2 April 2008, 14:46 GMT
This setup only works for web browsing, but then you can do everything else just as well on the Nokia anyway. With respect to usability, of course this is more proving a point than being a practical solution. But I don’t believe that the iPhone is marketing itself at the broad population anyway. I would dare to say that a lot of iPhone owners are actually techies, gadget addicts, just techies of a sort who appreciate good design. Just look at the massive amount of software and web apps being written for it. These are people who feel comfortable with technology anyway.
Comment by Martin Kleppmann — Wednesday, 2 April 2008, 20:56 GMT