Work begins on iPhone OS 3.0 jailbreak

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

The iPhone Dev-Team says the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 can be jailbroken but issued a warning to some 3G users eager to get that shiny new copy-paste feature.

Apple unveiled on Tuesday some of what it says will be 100 new features coming to the iPhone and iPod Touch with the new version of the mobile operating system. A beta version was made available immediately to everyone in the iPhone Developer Program, and it didn't take long for developers to get cracking on iPhone OS 3.0.

The Dev-Team confirmed that the new version is "jailbreakable" on all devices in a blog posted on Tuesday. But they said people who've already jailbroken their 3G devices with Yellowsn0w will run into trouble if they download the 3.0 beta.

This is because Yellowsn0w jailbreak capitalises on the device's baseband radio, which is used to link up the device with the network and which will be changed by the iPhone 3.0 update, according to InfoWorld's Ian Paul. The Dev-Team warns that upgrading to 3.0 with Yellowsn0w installed will cause people to lose Yellowsn0w and will be unable to get it back.

Needless to say, the Dev-Team weren't the only people tinkering around with the iPhone beta. One developer was able to activate the iPhone's tethering feature via a USB cable. Apple announced on Tuesday that it had built in the capability to tether an iPhone to a laptop via Bluetooth. But the company said it's up to individual carriers whether they want to make it available on their networks and that the feature wouldn't be widely available until that happened.