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

Adam Turner
Monday, 21 July 2008 09:12

IT Industry - Market

Apple and the telcos haven't bothered to customise the iPhone 3G for Australia, but you can do it yourself - and it works for any country.

If you're running a hacked iPhone 2G in Australia, it's easy to modify the dialing number format by adding the Whirlpool repository <wpool.com/iphone> to the Installer and then installing the Localisation patches. Over the weekend the iPhone Dev Team released Pwnage 2.0, which allows you to unlock and Jailbreak the 2.0 software on an iPhone 2G as well as Jailbreak the iPhone 3G.

I found a great Pwnage 2.0 Guide at ModMyiFone but unfortunately the Installer app isn't ready for 2.0 and Pwnage 2.0 only installs Cydia on the phone - which doesn't let you add extra repositories.

There's a great How To guide at the MacTalk forums for manually fixing the number display format , but this relies on having BSD Subsystem and Open SSH installed on your iPhone. Some hacking tools for the iPhone 2G added these by default, but Pwnage 2.0 doesn't. Cydia offers the option of installing Open SSH, but not BSD Subsystem.

Here's how it's done - I did this on an iPhone 2G using a MacBook running Leopard with the FileZilla FTP client installed. It probably works with Windows as well, and the iPhone 3G, but I haven't tried it and your mileage may vary.

Connect the iPhone to your local wifi network then go to Settings > Wi-Fi and then click on the blue arrow next to the network you're connected to. Take note of the IP Address, for example 192.168.0.3

Next launch the Terminal in Leopard (just type Terminal into Spotlight). At the Terminal command line type;

ssh This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .0.3
(obviously inserting the appropriate IP address)

Wait for it to generate a new key and accept the new computer host key if asked to. Now go over to your SFTP-compatible FTP client and enter the following;.

Host: sftp://192.168.0.3  (obviously inserting the appropriate IP address)
Username: root
Password: alpine
port: 22

If asked, agree to trust this host. Now you've SFTPed into the iPhone and you should be in the /private/var/root/ folder. From here you can follow the instructions over at MacTak to <a href="http://forums.mactalk.com.au/53/44006-babysteps-guide-better-aussie-number-formatting.html" target="blank">manually fix the number display format</a>, picking up from Step 3 and skipping Step 4.

This is the section of code that does the trick;

<key>au</key>
<array>
        <string>04## ### ###</string>
        <string>#### ####</string>
        <string>(03) #### ####</string>
        <string>(02) #### ####</string>
        <string>(07) #### ####</string>
        <string>(08) #### ####</string>
        <string>+61 4## ### ###</string>
        <string>+61 # #### ####</string>
        <string>1300 ### ###</string>
        <string>1800 ### ###</string>
        <string>1900 ### ###</string>
        <string>13# ###</string>
        <string>0011 $</string>
    </array>

If you study the format, it's not hard to figure out how to modify this for any country.

Now we've fixed the number display format, it's only slightly more complicated to fix the keyboard. CONTINUED