I recently purchased a dock for my iPhone from a guy on Ebay. It’s not an official Apple product, because $5 is a far better price than the $29 Apple wants for a piece of plastic. All-in-all, its a great little product, and it would be perfect but for one thing; every time I plug my iPhone 3G into it, it mutes the sound.

Of course, given that this dock has a Line Out jack on the back, it makes sense that it would disable my iPhone’s built-in speakers. After all, why would you want your iPhone’s tinny sound tarnishing whatever you plug in the back? However, seeing as I’m using it as a bed-side stand, there will never be a speaker system to tarnish. Here’s how to prevent it from muting your iPhone.

Step 1: Open it up. You’ll need a small phillips screwdriver, about 2.5mm in diameter. Just stab it through the rubber layer on the bottom and unscrew.

Step 2: Using a soldering iron, remove the tiny resistor (Pictured to the right) from the marked location on the PCB.

Step 3: Reassemble and enjoy. :)

new connection !
AMDeviceNotificationSubscribe = 0
iPhone attached !
AMDeviceConnect = 0
AMDeviceIsPaired = 1
AMDeviceValidatePairing = 0
AMDeviceStartSession = 0
MobileDevice: _send_message: Could not encode message as XML
AMDeviceStartService = 0
AFCConnectionOpen = 0

My initial search results lead me to downgrade the “Apple Mobile Device Support” component to the version used in iTunes 8.2.1.6, but this did not work. After a lot more searching, I discovered a slightly different tool, itunnel, which I originally discounted as just another name for iphone_tunnel. It is actually a modified version of iphone_tunnel, presumably for iTunes 9 compatibility. It works fine on my iPhone 3G, and I imagine the same would go for the iPhone 3GS.

You can download it from MediaFire (623.55 KiB).

I recently came across a post discussing the legality of using US iTunes gift cards in South Africa. In short, redeeming the voucher as a South African is a breach of contract, as you are breaking Apple’s terms and conditions on voucher redemption. The article goes on to cover why Apple includes these terms, and why breaking them may also lead you to break content copyrights.

So what does this mean for us? Effectively, Apple are entitled to terminate offending iTunes accounts on the basis that their terms of service were breached, which may well result in the account owners losing access to any purchased content.

Thus far, Apple have not enforced this, and I’m hoping they never do. Currently, it’s in their financial interest to turn a blind eye in favour of increased iTunes voucher sales, but if the content providers push hard enough, Apple’s stance may change and then we all lose out.

I decided to take a chance on http://www.buyfrompowerseller.com/, given their positive eBay feedback profile. The order went in at 18:35 GMT, and 76 minutes later, I had my voucher code; iTunes happily accepted it and my first purchase was entirely without incident. So far I’m entirely happy, although I’ll update this post if anything develops.

* Apparently South African law requires all “games” to be reviewed by the Film & Publications Board. Thus, even if an app is set for global distribution in iTunes, it won’t appear in the South African flavour.

P.S. 2011/07/19: I recently noticed that buyfrompowerseller.com is currently linking to this review on their affiliate page. For the record, I am not an affiliate of theirs, and I have not received anything from them except the iTunes voucher, which I purchased at full price. — Ashley

Are you sure you want to sync applications? All existing applications and their data on the iPhone will be replaced with applications from this iTunes library.

I’m not especially inclined to manually redownload all those apps, but nor am I keen on the idea of losing them all. Fortunately, I had not yet nuked the old PC and a quick search revealed that iTunes stores your downloaded apps under My Documents\My Music\iTunes\Mobile Applications. I simply copied all the .IPA files from my old PC over to the new one and then, in iTunes, clicked on File > Add Folder to Library…, selected the folder, and breathed a sigh of relief as the apps reappeared in the Applications library.

Of course, all this could be avoided if Apple provided a way to back up one’s Applications library. iTunes does provide a “Backup” feature that involves burning your library to CD/DVD, but that isn’t quite what I had in mind.