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Toyota Helping to Promote Jailbroken iphones

Discussion in 'Fred's House of Pancakes' started by ggood, Apr 4, 2011.

  1. ggood

    ggood Senior Member

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    Major Corporations Turn Attention to Jailbreak Scene

    "In July of last year, the Federal Government brought some clarification to a previously much-debated question and declared jailbreaking legal. Millions of folks who'd jailbroken their iDevices rejoiced, but aside from that not much changed visibly.

    Now, however, we are beginning to see signs pointing to the legitimization of the jailbreak community in big business' eyes. With millions of iDevices in circulation, and over 4-5 million active jailbreakers (that number being the amount of individual devices which have logged into Cydia in the past week), major corporations have largely been ignoring this major niche market. We're beginning to see that change. I got some rough numbers from saurik, who says 8-9% of iDevice users are jailbroken, 1.5 million unique users log into Cydia daily, 4-5 million weekly. By his estimate, there are 10-15 million jailbroken iDevices out there. He notes he'll have better stats soon due to his new database statistics structure.

    Scion, a brand of vehicles manufactured by Toyota, recently developed a custom iPhone theme specifically for jailbroken devices, submitting it to us for hosting in Cydia (full disclosure: they are also running an ad campaign through ModMyi.com within Cydia pointing to said theme, and this article is unrelated to that). Search Scion 2011 Theme in Cydia to find it. This is the first major corporation we have seen put direct positive attention into the jailbreak scene, developing specifically for it and addressing this large userbase."
     
    #1 ggood, Apr 4, 2011
  2. qbee42

    qbee42 My other car is a boat

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    Locked devices are a bad idea. Electronics companies should take a page out of the open source movement and make it easy for the community to contribute to the common base of software.

    It all comes down to greed. Instead of making a reasonable profit from their piece of the pie, these companies want the whole thing. Eventually, when their stubborn greed forces people to jailbreak, the companies feel ill used and clamor for protection.

    The fees for text messages are a good example. Text messages travel as data packets and are very inexpensive for cell systems. The low overhead for moving these messages isn't reflected in the rates charged by the cell phone companies, which routinely charge as much as 40,000 times as much as they would for the same amount of data. A reasonable profit is understandable, but 40,000 times! Come on. When the cell phone companies lose the text market to a third party they are going to cry foul. I have no sympathy.

    Tom
     
    #2 qbee42, Apr 4, 2011
  3. xs650

    xs650 Senior Member

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    The only legitimate reason I can think of for companies to restrict how their hardware is used is that is the extra support cost of dealing with non-standard configurations. That problem can be largely solved by not providing support for rooted/jailbroke devices until they are put back into stock firmware/software configuration.

    I like the way Barnes and Noble handles it with their Color Nook eReader. When I bought mine, they were selling a book right alongside it telling me how to root it to install full-up android to change it to a full fledged Tablet device. The B&N Nook forums have discussion of the topic too with some on line participation by B&N techs.

    There is also the CHDK firmware for Canon point and shoot cameras that enable several functions (RAW for example) that are only available on their higher end cameras. Canon could easily make CHDK difficult to use but they just ignore it.
     
    #3 xs650, Apr 4, 2011
  4. ggood

    ggood Senior Member

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    Well, that didn't last long...

    Apple to Toyota: Ditch the iPhone Jailbreak Theme | News | The Mac Observer

    "Toyota’s foray into advertising to iPhone users that jailbreak looks to be short lived thanks to a request from Apple that convinced the car maker to back out of that market. Toyota had been offering a home screen skin for the iPhone that advertised its Scion car, but the skin was available only through the Cydia app on jailbroken iOS devices."
     
    #4 ggood, Apr 5, 2011
  5. qbee42

    qbee42 My other car is a boat

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    I agree completely. All you need is a button or simple utility to restore to factory firmware. Factory tech support for any modified device would start with: "restore the factory firmware..."

    I generally get better support from the open source community than I get from commercial companies, sad to say.

    Tom
     
    #5 qbee42, Apr 5, 2011
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