This is NOT cool.

I just realized today that upgrading to firmware 3.0 with my iPhone 1st Gen, it killed my data connection with AT&T. I am on a PayAsYouGo plan since I use my phone very rarely. I don’t need to be paying a full contract when I do 1-2 calls per month (sometimes not even that). What I do a lot though, is use WiFi for my various data needs.

Not that I was using their EDGE connection much, which costs $10 per 1 MB (I am not that rich to throw away money at that pricing rate), but it was nice to know that it was there if I needed it. My iPhone was originally an unlocked device, but since AT&T doesn’t require activation anymore for its PayAsYouGo customers, I don’t bother unlocking it or otherwise hack it. I just use it, locked to AT&T’s service.

But this is not enough for AT&T it seems. They now disable the GPRS service altogether to those who don’t have an iPhone-specific account. They try to do what they do with Blackberry: if you don’t have a Blackberry-specific account, you can’t use their data service (and T-Mobile does the same shit as well btw), not even if you do want to pay them the crazy $10 per 1 MB rate.

The iPhone is a fully capable phone and this restriction is simply artificial and unnecessary. I find all this very disturbing, and I can’t wait for a time when people will be able to buy unlocked phones by default, like in many European countries.

There is a workaround to re-enable EDGE, but I don’t want to have anything to do with their stinky service anymore, so I won’t even bother. I will just use my phone even less now.

After years of running an old version, WordPress was updated today to the latest version with the amazing help of Adam Scheinberg, the OSNews webmaster. I was afraid that my custom theme/plugins would stop working, but everything went very smoothly! I will be keeping WordPress up to date now.

In the suggestion of Adam, I also installed the WPTouch plugin, which offers a mobile interface to the iPhone, iPod Touch, HTC Dream G1 & some few Blackberries, and I manually added support for the Palm Pre and more Android phones. Looks great! If you own such a device, check it out by simply loading up this blog on your browser.

Right now, WordPress is such a joy! I even disabled two plugins I used to use since the functionality is now built-in! And for a third plugin, I didn’t have to hack it, since the functionality is now built-in! Finally, the loading of the front page feels snappier! Much happy!

Update: If you are also using WPTouch and you would like more mobile support, do this: open with a text editor the wptouch.php file, search for the word “agent”, and change this:

“iPhone”,
“iPod”,
“aspen”,
“dream”,
“incognito”,

to this:

“iPhone”,
“iPod”,
“aspen”,
“dream”,
“Android”,
“WebOS”,
“Series60/3”,
“Series60/5”,
“incognito”,

This will add support for all Android phones, Palm Pre, and the specific Nokia smartphones that use webkit. Please convert the smart quotes above to plain double quotes before you insert the text to your script.