The iPhone Dev team has been known for plenty of releases thus far. From the original Pwnagetool to QuickPwn, every single one of their releases helps owners of iPhones and first gen iPod touches (myself included) jailbreak their device. For those who don’t know, this essentially unlocks more features for the user, for example access to other third-party software, and also the ability to SSH into the device (ie. directly modifying the files in the device as opposed to merely interacting with it through iTunes).
While the team managed to unlock the first-generation iPhone (ie. allowing the phone to be used with other carriers instead of it being locked to the primary one) a long time ago, they seemed to have been stumped by the 3G iPhone’s new architecture. Released almost half a year ago, they never really managed to figure out how to unlock the second-generation iPhone… until now.
The iPhone Dev team blog was recently updated less than 24 hours ago with this post, announcing the release of a beta version of the program they call yellowsn0w. It seems like they’ve finally managed to release a program that is able to finally unlock the iPhone 3G after months of hard work. This is the program plenty of iPhone 3G users have been waiting for, others have been waiting for such a release before they go out to buy an iPhone. The idea of being tied down to a 2 year AT&T contract was just too restrictive for most people, considering how everyone has their preferred carrier.
Unfortunately, being a beta, there have been plenty of reports thus far of the program not working for many users. According to a poll on the hackint0sh forums, the program works for roughly one-third out of the users at the time of this writing. A one-third success rate really doesn’t seem to good, and maybe the iPhone Dev team should have worked with it a little longer before releasing it to the public. Of course, who am I to say what they should or shouldn’t have done. They probably ran out of test units for all we know, and kudos to them for finally making a breakthrough. Let’s just hope they manage to improve on it time and again until it works for the vast majority of iPhone 3G users.
There could be certain ramifications with the release of this program though. For all we know, Apple could possibly release a firmware update next week touting their famous one-liner “This update contains some bug fixes” (which they include with the supposed “description” of many of their updates, be it iPhone ones or not) that ends up breaking yellowsn0w. While Apple has always turned a blind eye to jailbreaking, they’ve taken a pretty strong stance towards using the iPhone with AT&T only for some reason. Thus, while it’s likely that Apple will indeed try to prevent further unlocks, let’s hope it doesn’t happen.
And to all iPhone 3G users, congratulations 
Now, we’re all wondering when the second-generation iPod Touch will finally receive its jailbreak.
Anyone who owns an iPhone or iPod Touch will undoubtedly know the 2.2 OS update finally got released a few days ago. There has been much speculation about it, especially about the feature which would allow users to download new episodes of their favourite podcasts directly onto their device through Wifi or 3G. In the past, one had to download the podcast on to the computer through iTunes and only after which sync them to the device. It sounds a lot more troublesome as compared to this new feature, but in reality, I’m thinking that I’ll stick with downloading my podcasts through iTunes for now.
There is an alternative out there though: Podcaster. It’s a third party app that got rejected by Apple awhile ago before 2.2 was released because it supposedly “duplicated a current feature of the iPhone”. I’ve only played around with it for awhile thus far, but it seems like a better version of the system Apple has introduced, though the search function is obviously bugged because I can’t find many popular podcasts. Still, there’s one pretty useful feature: the ability to stream podcasts. Regardless if they’re audio or video podcasts, podcaster gives you the option to stream them to your device instead of having to download the entire podcast. This is really convenient, especially when you’re surfing around for new podcasts and only want to see what the podcast is like. The only setback for most users: Podcaster can only be installed on a jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch.