iPhone Firmware

Must be sad to be an old iPhone, or an original iPhone user for that matter. After almost three years in circulation, the aluminum-backed iPhone is officially obsolete. Apple's iPhone 4 upgrade will not run on the earliest iPhone hardware at all.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed that the company would cease support for the original iPhone in an email this week. When asked if the device would see any future updates he simply replied, "Sorry, no."

Steve Jobs revealed some stunning numbers today at the Apple iPhone 4 event. There have been 50 million iPhones sold, and an additional 35 million iPod Touch units. In addition to all of these devices running iPhone OS, iPad sales topped 450k units so far this week.

In six days, iPad users have downloaded 3.5 million iPad applications and 600k iBooks. Total downloads for the App Store to date is a whopping 4 billion downloads. There are 185,000 apps available, including 3,500 iPad only apps so far. With all of these mobile devices running Safari, Apple's share of mobile browser usage dominates at 64 percent. In second place comes the Android browsers with 19 percent, and BlackBerry takes third with a 9 percent total share.

Sources familiar with pre-release builds of iPhone OS 4.0 claim the operating system will lift restrictions on the multitasking of apps. AppleInsider reports that an interface modeled after the Mac OS X Expose feature would show icons of all running apps and allow the user to switch between them.

In the desktop version of Expose, windows of running applications are reduced in size and aligned so they can all be seen simultaneously. Currently, only a list of native iPhone apps is permitted to run in the background, although iPhone OS is fully capable of multitasking. These apps include the iPod, SMS, Phone, Mail, and Voice Recorder among others.

George Hotz (Geohot) continues to show off his iPhone hacking achievements with an untethered jailbreak. He announced the successful experiment on his blog along with posting a video of his iPhone rebooting.

According to Geohot, the entire project took 2.5 days to complete from start to finish. He refuses to set a release date, although the iPad release date of April 3rd is possible. The new jailbreak is supposedly just as easy to run as blackra1n, his previous one-click solution.