As Tanc said, it could be a while before iPhone will hit other countries other than US. Our only hope of seeing it earlier, is if somebody can unlock it and let us use other carrier’s SIM card other than AT&T. A removable SIM card in iPhone is a good sign for hackers, because it indicates that the phone is locked using firmware, which can likely be cracked. Using SIM card from other carrier will not work as you still need to activate your iPhone using your iTunes.

So what's the status now of iPhone being used as open and not exclusive only to AT&T and other future authorized only carriers? When we can expect an iPhone that is just like most of the common Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung cellphones that we can purchase over the counter, pop-in any available SIM card, and simply use it (no activation required).

Or at least not even as a phone, I know some people want to use iPhone as Internet device (surfing thru Wifi) and as a touch-screen iPod Video; unfortunately even up to now, for you to enable all those functions including the camera, you still need iTunes activation which means 2 years contract to AT$T.

Here's some good news: I’m reading Gj’s Notes in iPhone Dev Wiki and seems like they will be able to hack iPhone within this week. He even suggests: “I firmly believe the phone can be unlocked and activated even without iTunes... I think we can do it using # codes or keypad presses.” Whoa!

People already disassembled iPhones and studied what's inside - here’s one of them. They found that iPhone’s processor is Samsung S3C6400. It runs at a whopping 667 Mhz, the fastest available on a consumer handheld as the high-end Intel-based handhelds processor is at 624 Mhz only, although Marvell and Qualcomm have both announced faster chips in the future.

Some other features of this chip are:

• ARM1176JZF-S based CPU Subsystem with Java acceleration Engine, TrustZone and Intelligent Energy Manager (reduce power consumption 25-50% in portables that is reason why so far iPhone battery life tests have far exceeded expectations) – Java acceleration is natively supported; secured and trusted computing environment between OS, Apps, Network, etc. - this is like SELinux hard coded in chip –bad news for hackers.
• Clock speed can be up to 700MHZ or more
• One 8-bit ITU 601/656 Camera Interface of up to 4M pixel for scaled and 16M pixel for un-scaled resolution – this confirms to what I heard that iPhone can even upgrade the camera’s pixel thru software upgrade!
• Multi Format CODEC (MFC) provides encoding and decoding of MPEG-4/H.263/H.264 up to 30fps@SD, and decoding of VC1 video up to 30fps@SD
• Vector floating point coprocessor - 2D Graphics Acceleration with BitBlt and Rotation – is this for future generation of iPhone with games? Whoa!
• AC-97 audio codec interface and PCM serial audio interface
• 1/2/4/8 bpp Palletized or 16/24bpp Non-Palletized Color-TFT support up to 1024x1024
• High Speed-MMC/SD card support – Another new feature candidate for the next generations.
• Mobile DDR MemoryInterface with x16 or x32 data bus (266Mbps/pin DDR)

They also found 3G and GPS capabilities in the chips (not confirmed), as I said in my earlier post, those features seems like reserved in the next generations of iPhone but can even activated by firmware update.

Live update of iPhone hardware and other new discoveries can be found here if you are interested.

Looks interesting to me specially the learning about the hardware, OS X, and the technology as a whole that Apple used to build iPhone. Another cool thing here is how those hackers giving so much information while they are on the process of breaking this magnificent piece of technology.

It’s all good!