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Now the iPhone will have 30 different ways to check stock prices, get weather updates and read RSS feeds!

Well, I'm not sure anybody's done any of the first two yet, although there is an RSS reader.

You did a bit of digging... In reply to my post, someone pointed out the web page for people programming iphones. In response, I bought one, and began to work on developing apps for iPhone. Now, my iPhone is dead, thanks to a-hole Steve. Yes, I think I will help Ubuntu, and fuck Steve. And, frankly, you do a lot of digging for a fairly stupid person.

I see where you are coming from. However, your analogy is not a fair comparison. You are most certainly not renting the iPhone. It is yours. By the very nature of rental agreement, you do not own anything at all. But by purchasing the iPhone, you have only exchanged money with the vendor in exchange for a piece of hardware. If you want to blend it, unlock it, or even use it with AT&T's rate plan, you can. There is no obligation to do anything with your phone. You could even use it as a paperweight after you've bought it.

But, just to play devil's advocate on your behalf, perhaps the analogy should be with a condo and a house. You do own a condo, but you are bound by certain agreements that limits your freedom. The logic behind these limitations is usually in order to foster a certain type of community for the all condo owners. In fact, Apple's own justification about limiting 3rd party development invokes a desire to avoid "gum[ming] up" the network:

But it's not like the walled garden has gone away. "You don't want your phone to be an open platform," meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs. "You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up."

But I believe that's bullshit. Everybody and their brother is allowing development on their phones. Also, in line with this, the U.S. is virtually alone in the world with locked phones. For the beacon of capitalism in the world that the U.S. supposedly represents, we sure don't offer the myriad choices that demand and an free market would dictate must exist. I'm even more impatient with this crap, after living in Asia. I can get cheap, unlocked phones very easily here that will work both in the U.S. and all over the world. And the incentives built-in with providers isn't very convincing except for the most frugal buyer, or perhaps for the the very first-time buyer. Nope, this locking crap (both software and carrier) is for the birds.

http://www.metasploit.com/
http://code.google.com/p/iphone-dev/
http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

A procedure exists - and has been tested quite a bit now - to reverse the iBrick'd efforts. linked here.

hurray , i can now buy a phone that has less features (no SMS, no MMS, no video calls) than my old Nokia did in 2001

The iPhone does support SMS (and always has.) It also has real email (which is far more useful than MMS has ever been), a real web browser, a high-quality video player and arguably the best music player ever on a phone. It has also become very easy to install third party software on and has a rapidly growing community of developers. Someone has even managed to implement video chat!

The iPhone isn't about having a ton of features though. Its about having a phone with a UI that isn't really really shit and having the features that it does have work very well. These are the things that differentiates its from your Nokia.

http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/GUI_App lications

There are currently 32 native iPhone apps on that page including 8 games, an AIM client, 2 IRC clients (not including BitchX), a fully functional VT100 terminal, RSS, eBook readers and much more with the development constantly growing. These are all open source and written in UIKit/Cocoa, with other apps happening that aren't listed there.

Just because the application development isn't officially Apple sanctioned doesn't mean it isn't happening.

Shouldn't the article link be replaced so that the wiki won't get slashdotted?

I don't suppose anyone bothered to read/honor this simple request knowing the effect /. can have on a website.

http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/Popular ity_Problem

Would have been nice if someone had actually linked the wiki page instead of having to goto the IRC channel.... http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php?title=M ain_Page

This has reached the point of silliness. Efforts to “crack open” the iPhone have been met with large degrees of success. As has been reported elsewhere, a developer tool chain is in the early stages. The iPhone has been owned and the genie is out of the bottle. Apple, why not just open it up officially? Face up to the obvious fact that it is a hand-held computer with decent horsepower that many technology geeks will want to use creatively and constructively. Releasing official development tools will give a segment of the market what it clearly wants anyway (look at the rapid progress hackers have made) and give incentive for us hold-outs to buy-in. How much simpler does this have to get?

The iPhone does have XNU (which is Mach based), but it most certainly does not have the BSD userland.

Isn't it time roughlydrafted.com links were banned from Slashdot?

the iPhone doesn't require signed binaries

Check out the iPhone Dev Wiki here. As of 10:15 PM (July 6th) they are here:

* A serial console is now working to the device. It requires a 6.8k resistor from pin 21 to ground, and tie pin 11 (sergnd) to the real ground. You can use iPhoneInterface to send some commands in recovery mode (setenv debug-uarts 1, saveenv, and reboot), and then you'll be in the boot loader.

        * Some of us believe that the boot loader is the key to really unlocking the radio but we have several other approaches a serial console has enabled us to test. A few of us have been hard at work on some proof of concept code for these pieces, and we will release them as available.

        * We know exactly how to unlock the radio right now. The problem is, getting the commands to the radio has proved more difficult than we anticipated. We have a couple of different potential vectors:
                    o The boot loader's memory display and writing commands, or the ability to send commands to the radio directly using 'radio send'. Many of these commands report permission denied. We are interested in getting around this.
                    o bbupdater and imeisv can do interesting things with the radio. We are trying to get to the point where we can run these commands and get output back.

        * We have made some really good progress getting third party apps to run on the phone. More information on this will be available soon.

Check out the iPhone Dev Wiki here. As of 10:15 PM (July 6th) they are here:

* A serial console is now working to the device. It requires a 6.8k resistor from pin 21 to ground, and tie pin 11 (sergnd) to the real ground. You can use iPhoneInterface to send some commands in recovery mode (setenv debug-uarts 1, saveenv, and reboot), and then you'll be in the boot loader.

        * Some of us believe that the boot loader is the key to really unlocking the radio but we have several other approaches a serial console has enabled us to test. A few of us have been hard at work on some proof of concept code for these pieces, and we will release them as available.

        * We know exactly how to unlock the radio right now. The problem is, getting the commands to the radio has proved more difficult than we anticipated. We have a couple of different potential vectors:
                    o The boot loader's memory display and writing commands, or the ability to send commands to the radio directly using 'radio send'. Many of these commands report permission denied. We are interested in getting around this.
                    o bbupdater and imeisv can do interesting things with the radio. We are trying to get to the point where we can run these commands and get output back.

        * We have made some really good progress getting third party apps to run on the phone. More information on this will be available soon.