IPhone news and information

Archive for November, 2008

Here you have it. Linux running on the iPhone. Yes, it's only the first port, but it's the iPhone running the Linux OS, controlled with a USB keyboard running off the iPhone multi-purpose port thanks to the reverser engineering of Apple's hardware drivers by iPhone Dev Team member planetbeing. And while it is still limited and doen't have support for many things, this work opens the door to a much more interesting thing than just a character-based terminal: Google's Android running on the iPhone hardware.

Just imagine that. Google taking the smartphone war directly into Apple territory. Sure, most people would not care about this, but the mere fact that Google would be able to do this—and maybe not even Google directly, but someone else using Android's codebase—is a pretty big statement. I, for one, would love to see this happening, even while I personally think that Android is half-baked and most people will ignore it. For now.

At this time, the Linux port has the framebuffer driver (for video), the serial driver, serial over USB driver, and drivers for the interrupts, the clock, and miscellaneous hardware components. They don't have most of the other things, like write support for the NAND memory, wireless networking, touchscreen drivers, sound, accelerometer, and, one big and, the baseband chip, which is what makes the iPhone communicate with the cellular networks.

But the fact is that it's getting there and, knowing this, I'm sure several Google employees are scrambling to get the codebase for this port, and maybe help in the effort.

[Linux on iPhone via iPhone Dev Team—Thanks GloKidd]

Joost lost the video war a while ago, thinking a P2P app that imitated TV would be the way people wanted to watch TV and movies on their computer. They were wrong, and only recently rectified the mistake. It's probably too late for them. But their new iPhone app, which streams over 46,000 videos including full movies like Men in Black and Starship Troopers for free over Wi-Fi, is actually kind of exciting.

It's kind of crashy, could use a better navigation UI and takes too long for movie streams to get going (and then when they do it's kind of finicky) but we definitely appreciate being to stream The Fifth Element over Wi-Fi in decent quality, when it actually gets going. More than anything though, it just makes us soak our pillow with even more drool dreaming of a Hulu app. [iTunes via NewTeeVee]