The most-hyped (if not anticipated) mobile phone in the history of mobile phones has recently published the first firmware update. For those not hip to the techno lingo - firmware is the “programming” that runs the actual hardware that runs a device.

Ordinarily a firmware update would not be newsworthy, but this is a special case. Since it was released, the iPhone was locked into a very proprietary scheme (par for the course with Apple products) that didn’t allow the user to easily make use of third party applications nor allow the user to take their rather expensive gadget to another network.  Certain industrious individuals had managed to unlock the iPhone and get the most out of the hundreds of dollars spent.

Apple’s recent firmware update undoes all of that hard work. For phones that have been unlocked, the phone has been rendered into what is commonly called a “brick” – that is, an unusable state. Topping that off, many (some say all) third party applications have been rendered unusable.

Here are some headlines:

Gizmondo downgrades the iPhone from “Wait” to “Don’t Buy”

Ars Technica has a list of what works, and what doesn’t, after the upgrade.

PhoneNews.com questions the legality of iPhone bricking. 

And remember, the Gphone is rumored to be arriving next month. 

As for this me, I’m quite happy with my BlackBerry.

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest IT product manufacturer, has hinted at a wish to make the leap into the handheld gaming market with their prototype for the Mscape an “augmented reality system” which is purported to overlay a virtual world onto the physical world.

Though there is no indication that HP will actually produce and sell this device, the subter staff thinks this looks an awful lot like Roddy Piper’s glasses from the Carpenter cult-classic “They Live”.

Source: Destructoid

From Wired News

A federal district court judge struck down two key pillars of the Patriot Act Wednesday, ruling that using a secret spying court to wiretap and secretly search Americans’ homes for criminal prosecutions violates the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Read more here.