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Using voicemail with Airtel on an iPhone

Tushar Burman — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:42:36 +0000

So it appears that Airtel will take your money for a shiny new iPhone, but has absolutely zero support for it. God help you if you want to use a value-added service like (gasp) voicemail. I’ve been subscribed for a month and I only just got it working.

Here’s the thing: in Mumbai, the voicemail number is 555, except it isn’t, and most of Airtel doesn’t know this. After a number of complaints, a mysterious call from an Airtel employee told me to use 567 instead. This works. Still no idea how to set a custom greeting.

So you now know your voicemail number. Great! Except that your iPhone doesn’t. It still thinks it’s 555. You tell it otherwise by punching in a USSD code on your phone dialpad thus:

*5005*86*567# (press “call”)

Now your iPhone knows it’s own voicemail number. Brilliant. Almost.

Here’s the other thing: the iPhone doesn’t have settings for “call divert” like other phones. That is, there are no explicit settings for whether the call should go to voicemail if unanswered, busy or out of coverage. The iPhone manual is also vague about this. However, since voicemail is a network feature, it’s possible to set options using network USSD codes, and generic GSM ones at that! What I used:

Send to voicemail if unanswered: **61*567#

Send to voicemail if out of coverage: **62*567#

I didn’t use this one, but it’s useful because you can then send any call to voicemail by simply pressing the lock button twice (busy signal):

Send to voicemail if busy: **67*567#

There’s a whole bunch of options to these well, so I’ll just link to the sources:

http://www.iphonehacks.com/2007/09/voicemail-hack.html

http://www.theunwired.net/?item=how-to-diverting-voice-calls-by-using-ussd-codes

iPhone 3GS factory-unlocked

Tushar Burman — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:41:36 +0000

With no sign of Apple officially launching the 3GS here, one couldn’t be blamed for taking the plunge into the grey market. I did a little over a month ago and have had no problems. More recently, the iPhone snobs in the office managed to convince another colleague to buy one as well.

The good news is that factory-unlocked iPhones are now going for what hacktivated ones used to. The premium is so minimal that there’s really no reason to save the cash and go through the cat-and-mouse routine with pwnage, hacktivation et al. I can confirm that the phones work as expected and will explicitly state that they are unlocked, once reset and connected to iTunes. Using a Vodafone SIM (an official iPhone 3G carrier), the phone also supports internet tethering out of the box. Baseband and firmware is the latest available.

Brilliant stuff. Ten points for Indian grey market enterprise.

iPhone 2.2 update

Tushar Burman — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:33:48 +0000

The latest 2.2 firmware doesn’t add much I want. Street View in Google Maps is admittedly cool, however. The phone is snappy and crashes less. By now, there are no must-have apps left in the jailbroken realm, but since caller ID STILL does not work by default, I’ve been forced to jailbreak and replace the phone format file by hand. Thankfully, a one-click fix is already on Cydia, so the next time round will be easier.

Here’s hoping the next time round actually, finally allows background notifications.

iPhone 2.1 update

Tushar Burman — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 10:56:21 +0000

And so we have the third bug-fix update since the big 2.0. Minor changes to the iPod app and a relatively faster SMS experience. It’s been a year since I had a real chat application on my phone and my patience is running wafer-thin. At this point, the Nokia E71 is looking like an increasingly attractive alternative—it has every feature I’d want and can do everything the iPhone can’t. I’d lose the super-fluid and intuitive interface, but I grew up with DOS, so…

In brief: I wouldn’t recommend an iPhone to anyone, anymore. It’s not worth the compromises, or the official price. It still makes some sense for me, since I mostly live on the Web and appreciate the touch interface. But 15 months and still no background data? Come. Fucking. On!

Update: Looks like a lot of you are having trouble with the lack of caller ID on the iPhone in India. If you’re jailbroken, try this link. It’s what I used. There’s also an Installer.app package that does the same thing, but I haven’t tested it.

iPhone 3G Launch Coverage

Tushar Burman — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 08:51:34 +0000

Turn to page 5 of today’s Economic Times for the most ridiculous, puerile, poorly-researched coverage of the new iPhone, what it means for consumers and the usual spec countdown. Of particular note, the box item mentions that OS X is vulnerable to virii and malicious attacks, much like Symbian and WinMo. BlackBerry OS is, “of course”, excluded. Brilliant.

And it gets better from there. One of the stories is about Airtel’s “techies” being super-confident that their built-in security measures will ensure that swapping SIMs remains an unattractive alternative for iPhones bought from Airtel. Their claim is that while it may be possible for “hackers” to use Airtel’s iPhone for voice calls, they will be left out in the cold for the new, Airtel-exclusive features including Airtel Live and Google.

I don’t even know where to begin with this article. It’s grossly inaccurate in some parts and utterly banal in others. From Airtel’s perspective, what it reads like: “You can buy it and put another SIM into it, but you won’t be able to access our overpriced ringtones, news alerts, wallpapers and assorted crap. Because that shit is on an internal network. So you can’t get at it from elsewhere. We call that security.”

Tech reportage at it’s finest: by the feeble-minded, for the feeble-minded.