Ok, I’m one of those who thought the whole ‘Web 2.0’ development model rah-rah RSJ presented for the iPhone was, well, lame.
Now there’s been several ways to ‘jailbreak’ the phone, such as this one explained at tuaw.com.
But there’s always been the sword hanging over developer’s heads that Apple could disable this functionality with a firmware update. It seems that they’re not inclined – at the moment – to do so.
Greg Joswiak of Apple says that while they won’t support development, they won’t hinder it either. (nothing was said about breaking the service provider lock)
So if you break your iPhone, you own both parts. But that’s a pretty enlightened approach – and it gives them an opportunity to survey the landscape for application development (and developers) as well. Sometimes that works out (SoundJam/iTunes), sometimes it doesn’t (Watson/Sherlock).
It also implies that applications running on the iPhone should run on the iPod touch as well.
Update: Or maybe not.