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I can’t help but envy the passion these people have to modify their phone. The irony is, Nokia is open, but the path is difficult. The iPhone is definitely locked, so difficulties are expected. Maybe ‘no access’ is better than ‘difficult access’. Sheesh.
links for 2007-09-17
There are two distinct aspects to the openness of a platform for developemnt: how easy it is to develop on the platform, and whether that development is officially sanctioned or not. The irony you refer to only appears if you try to look at these aspects as one and the same.
For iPhone hackers (or, indeed, to hackers in general), official support doesn’t matter much. It’s not “no access” just because Apple says so.
As to the easiness of development: what could be easier for a hacker on Mac OS X than an OS X -based phone, with many of the same APIs and frameworks?
Of course, Apple designed the iPhone this way for themselves, not for third party developers. It makes you think: if iPhone is so easy to develop for that people are doing it just for fun, without an official SDK, imagine what the productivity of Apple engineers working on the iPhone is like — at least in comparison to developers working on system software for other phones.