Gearfuse

We haven’t been talking about the Amazon Kindle 2 a lot. Know why? Because everyone and their mother has been talking about it. Jeff Bezos was even on The Colbert Report shilling his new eBook reader. Interestingly, though, when the boys at iFixIt cracked open a brand new Kindle 2, they found a surprise waiting inside. See that circled area on the PCB? That’s a space for a SIM card. And something tells me, that with a soldering iron, a SIM card holder and some programming, you could turn the Kindle 2 into an entirely new device. Perhaps you could even speed up the downloads of eBooks and digital content.

Any ideas? What do you think that missing SIM slot is for?

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Love your shiny, new G1 phone but don’t want to stay bound to T-Mobile? No problemo. The team at Love For Biz discovered you can unlock the G1 yourself in little to no time. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Insert friends activated T-mobile SIM into G1 along with battery
2. Power on and wait for setup screen
3. Go through setup process to link any Gmail account
4. Go to Settings > Wireless Controls > Wi-Fi Settings > Enable Wi-Fi
5. Connect to nearby Wi-Fi network if one is available
6. Optional: Stop the phone from syncing with Gmail account by going to Data Synchronization and unchecking Auto-sync, Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts
7. Once done, take out friends SIM card and insert unactivated SIM that came with G1

If you don’t have a blank SIM card, waltz into any T-Mobile store and with enough social engineering and excuses, you should be able to procure one. This is fantastic news for both T-Mobile and AT&T users who are looking to defect to another network or use the G1.

Update: It appears that this won’t let you use AT&T but it will let you use the G1 as a nice little Internet device using only WiFi.

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With iPhone 2.0 on the horizon, everyone’s buying up what 1st-gen iPhones are still available. If you manage to score one and don’t use AT&T, you’ll have to jailbreak the phone. Instead of relying on conventional unlocking methods though, why not give the Universal SIM Unlock Card a go?

As the name implies, this is indeed a SIM card that’s said to unlock Apple’s iPhone and a cavalcade of other devices. You throw it in there, it works a little magic and next thing you know, your phone is unlocked. At $23, it seems like a great investment to start your own unlocking biz.

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We all know the bittersweet joy of switching cell phone plans. You are so happy that you don’t have to deal with the crap that your last company was giving you, but you now get the opportunity to reprogram every single one of your contacts back into your new phone. If you are one of the lucky few, you can just sync them with a contact program in your computer. If you aren’t one of these people, this iMONO Direct Access Card Reader might be just the thing for you. This thing lets your plug your SIM card into its port, and edit your contacts through a simple interface right on your computer screen. That little keypad is a pain to type contacts into, we all know it. There is a big difference between texting someone and inputing names and numbers for hours on end. So for only $25, you can get this little gadget and save yourself a ton of time. Time is money people, time is money…

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