UK iPhone’s new firmware to trash current hacks

Nov. 9 could perhaps be the new national holiday in Britain, what with many Brits expected to jam stores for the UK launch of the iPhone.

But the iPhone rollout in UK presents a new challenge to the hacking community. The UK iPhones will carry a new iPhone firmware — 1.1.2 — rendering all existing hacks to jailbreak the phone worthless.

The Brit hacking community is all prepped up, vowing to hack open the UK iPhones within two hours from launch!

Read UK’s T3 report about this, and their review too.

The Daily Telegraph says that despite the handset’s quirks, the iPhone will still sell. But what raised my eyebrow in its report is this part:

Meanwhile, a study revealed that an extra 2 million mobile phones are to go on the scrapheap this Christmas because consumers do not understand how to recycle.

The survey by Tesco Mobile found that 20 per cent of Britons throw away old handsets.

That’s a big number of phones that the Brits should just donate to Third World countries especially in Africa where handsets are scarce among communications-challenged people.