Jailbreak

The great thing about jailbreaking (and no, it's not this) is that a lot of smart people take a look at the capabilities of the iPhone and wonder how come nobody made a (insert program here) yet? And then go and develop said program.

Case in point: A p2p client for the iPhone

iSlsk, developed by Eric Castro, is Soulseek in native app form for the iPhone. It uses the Soulseek network to let iPhone (+iPod touch) users share songs with one another. Once the songs are downloaded, iSlsk imports them into your iTunes library for seamless playback. There is a lot of promise in such a program, imagine being able to download whatever you want, whenever you want.

I'm starting to think I really do have clout around this interweb thing (I can dream)

First, Installer.app received a search feature after I complained about the lack of it in my review. Now, my other complaint, the slight hesitation after installing new programs that sends you back to your unlock screen, has been fixed. It now quickly relaunches your Home Screen to seamlessly load the newly downloaded programs, which essentially makes Installer.app and its functions even more integrated into the iPhone.

WinPwn, the Pwnage tool for Windows, has finally left beta and is now available for official release. WinPwn 1.0 claims to be much more stable than previous beta releases and includes many bug fixes and new features. WinPwn is an incredibly safe and powerful way of jailbreaking your iPhone. It can jailbreak any firmware and the folks over at Pwnage believe that it will eventually replace the likes of iLiberty+ and ZiPhone.

A lot of people look at the iPhone, in its current iteration, and complain that while it looks good, it lacks customization and is in dire need of native applications. And there’s a lot of truth to that, Apple has restricted much of the features on the iPhone and has limited what you can and cannot do. As much as it falls in line with keeping the user interface clear and intuitive, making users become passive to development prevents Apple from fully realizing the iPhone’s potential.

You want to run 3^rd party apps? Safari and Web Apps is the only ‘official’ way. Granted that Web Apps have come a long way, it doesn’t give justice to the true power of the iPhone as much as it shows off the versatility of Safari.

Currently, the only answer to this dilemma is jailbreaking. After having mulled the jailbreaking option a few times before, I made the switch only a couple months ago. And my, if you want to get a true glimpse of what the iPhone can do, Jailbreaking is currently the only way to go. In this article, I’ll show you why you should strongly consider jailbreaking and what it offers for iPhone users.

Read On For The Reasons to Jailbreak!

Avast ye scurvy 2.0 firmware -- prepare to be pwned! Erica Sadun of TUAW tells us the cartoon Jobs'ing, Russian slang'ing, custom firmware making, iTunes loading unlock solution has hit version 1.1:

The new tool allows you to add custom packages, logos and fixes EDGE settings under 1.1.4. Either pop over to iPhone-dev.org or choose PwnageTool > Check for Updates (Command-U) directly from the app.

But don't raise the Jolly Roger too soon, rumors are also circulating that Cap'n Jobs is coming about hard, cannon's loaded, and may just be upping the ante soon in the great unloack cat'n'mouse game.

Real nice, Bohn. Fine. Let's do this.

As most probably know, Canada doesn't have the iPhone. Well, we do, but it's a cr@ppy piece of VoIP. Nothing near as revolutionary or useful as Le Steve's little universe denter. We also have a GSM monopoly with data rates so high Warren Buffet wants no part of them. (A national newspaper once calculated that to even approach an AT&T type iPhone plan on Rogers would cost well over $1000 a month, and would still offer less service).

We haven't covered the latest in the hacking front here at Phone different for a few reasons:

As previously mentioned, US Apple Store's have been surprisingly (or suspiciously) out of iPhone stock lately.

Some have speculated that this is due to the immanent release of a 3G iPhone, others have cited atypical supply chain management issues, component shortages, or shipping problems.

In a long post based on info from an anonymous source nom-de-tip'd, Tantrum, Roughly Drafted brings a third option to the table: Pirates. (JAR!)

JAR! The "Cat and Mouse Game" between the nasty pirates and the royal Cupertino navy seems to have shifted decidedly in the pirates favor, or so says Engadget:

Those crafty kids on the iPhone Dev Team have already hacked the 2.0 firmware, but now they're getting ready to release the oh-so-creatively-named PWNED tool, which takes iPhone hacking to the next level by patching the bootloader to let you load any firmware image you want -- even images not signed by Apple. That means custom patched firmware can now be loaded directly from iTunes, which simplifies the jailbreaking / unlocking process tremendously, and also means that a patched version of the 2.0 firmware is coming soon.

Video after the break!