iPhone Hacks and Software: Getting Closer to iPhone Unlocking

With the news of the iPhone being released by Apple, the number of iPhone hacks has increased exponentially and a great deal of energy has been put into working through the iPhone software to find where the passwords and “glue” are for a number of applications. The “Holy Grail” right now is iPhone unlocking.

Unlocking the iPhone is indeed the most requested hack, and unlocking means that the iPhone can be used on any network and not just AT&T’s. There have been a couple of claims to have pulled off this latest iPhone hack, but so far these are just rumors, though it seems a couple are getting close and have managed to gain ownership of the file system. Checking the iPhone software and especially the gif images that are embedded seems to be the main concern of any self-respecting iPhone hack merchant around the world.

A GigaOM writer claims that they have managed to get all the features of the iPhone working except for the phone, voicemail and text features. To be honest I don’t see the point of all this, getting an iPhone hack to unlock the beast is not going to be of much use unless you are using the iPhone abroad and also you won’t have 3G support.

Where I do see value in unlocking the iPhone software is that once we have the iPhone unlocked, we can use the device as a mini-laptop running over Wi-Fi, so we have something that’s going to be useful.

On the iPhone news grapevine, it’s not just the iPhone hacks that are streaming fast and abundantly, there are also a number of full web apps which I have to say are pretty impressive, well done guys! Probably the best one right now is the “iChat for iPhone” iPhone Hack which gives you instant messaging capability on AIM. More than that, iPhone software source is available for this hack and you can host it on your own machine. If you really want to stay up to date with the latest in iPhone unlocking and iPhone hacks, check out the iPhone Dev Wiki which seems to me the closest thing to getting an iPhone unlock hack.

iPhone software that you can download on your new iPhone can be found under iPhone Apps on the web. Here you will find all the software and applications for iPhone, like iWeather, and more games than you can imagine. Unfortunately, until we have an iPhone hack that opens the iPhone to third-party apps, we’ll have to make do with the Apple iPhone software we can play with right now.

How long before we have an iPhone hack that helps us unlock the iPhone completely is like asking how long is a piece of string, but with the energy being put into it, I suppose it could be any time.