iPhone 3G customisation - how to hack the keyboard and number display format for any country

Adam Turner
Monday, 21 July 2008 08:12

IT Industry - Market

After the long wait for an official worldwide iPhone 3G, Apple and the telcos insult Aussies by not bothering with the most basic of localisation - so here's how to do it yourself.
Pull an Australian iPhone 3G out of the box and the regional locationisation settings are still set to the US. Worse still, when you dip into the menus to fix things you find that the Australian-specific settings either aren't there or don't work. iPhone 3G owners in some other countries face the same problem.

Why shouldn't Australians import iPhones and hack them if Apple and the telcos do nothing to customise the phones for Australian conditions? The iPhone 3G has already been Jailbroken for Mac (and sort of Windows) thanks to Pwnage 2.0 from the iPhone Dev Team , and an unlock hack is imminent. Why pay extra for an Australian iPhone 3G when Apple has such little regard for Australian users?

My biggest gripe with the iPhone is the number display format as you dial a number, or for numbers in your address book. Out of the box the number format is set to US, so a Sydney phone number appears as (029) 876 5432 rather than (02) 9876 5432. Mobile phone numbers are displayed exactly the same way.

If you dip into the settings at Settings > General > International > Region Format and change it to Australia you'd expect it to fix the problem. You'd be wrong. Changing the region format to Australia displays all numbers as one ten digital string such as 0298765432. I'm especially annoyed about this because Optus assured me this would be fixed when the iPhone 3G went on sale in Australia.

Is it really too much to expect this to work, considering Apple has gone to the trouble of adding an Australian option?

My next gripe is the keyboard format. By default it's set to "English", by which Apple naturally means "American". A visit to Settings > General > International > Keyboards lets you add other keyboards, but the only other option for English speakers is English (UK).

Pressing the Globe icon on the iPhone's onscreen keyboard lets you toggle through the different keyboards you've enabled (which is a great way to mess with a friend's head after they've had a few drinks). The main difference (apart from changing the currency symbol) is that it alters the way the .com button works. Under standard English you can hold the button to get extra options; .net, .edu and .org. Change the keyboard to English (UK) and you get .edu, .org, .co.uk and .com. Where's the English (AU) keyboard option? How hard would it be for Apple to add this option, or for the Australian telcos to insist on it?

On an unhacked Australian iPhone 3G there's no way to fix this. Once you Jailbreak it, here's how you can Australianise your iPhone. CONTINUED