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August 25, 2007

Hacked the iPhone...  

Probably one of the more anticipated hacks took place late last week.  The iPhone was hacked allowing it to connect to T-Mobile, releasing it from the bindings of AT&T(Cingular). 

Now, the lameness that is AT&C is one of our top-ten reasons not to go out and buy the iPhone.  OK, to be honest, it's the first five of our top-ten reasons not to go out and buy the iPhone. But just because it's been hacked open once, we're not sure that's enough here to make this an attractive package yet. 

The real open question is "will Apple go after these freed phones and make them pay?"  What do we mean by that?  Well, look to Sony's Playstation Portable for example.  Lots of system hacks on that machine to let it play games from the memory stick, run emulators, run lots of stuff that Sony doesn't control and by that doesn't approve of in the most extreme sense.  If you have any of these hacks on your PSP when you accept a system upgrade from Sony's web site, you end up bricked. Not because they're incompatible, but because Sony has a seek and destroy mentality when it comes to people repurposing their product. (Important distinction: Not your product, Sony's Product.)

Apple, probably under pressure from AT&C, could succumb to similar creepy policies and start bricking iPhones that have been hacked.  Worse, given the connected nature of the device, we suspect they could do it at any time.  Making that 911 call and all of a sudden your phone is just unresponsive... hey, you shouldn't have messed with their product.

In any case, we recoginze it's hard to wash the Cingular stink out of a product, but we hope those with the right skills will keep scrubbing.

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