the iPhone 3G/iPod touch 2G is a tougher nut to crack

The iPhone 3G was unveiled by Steve Jobs back in June, but hackers are having a tougher time cracking the software to make the iPhone carrier-free and jailbreak the iPod touch. It seems that one of the under-the-hood improvements carried out by the Cupertino geeks was making the devices harder to crack.

The current state of play is that the iPhone 3G has been jailbroken so that third-party software can run on it, but it has yet to be unlocked to make it carrier-free. The iPod touch 2G, which was released a couple of weeks ago, has so far not been jailbroken.

Here's what one of the teams working on an unlock has to say:

Regarding the two current challenges:  the 3G iPhone soft unlock and iPod Touch 2G jailbreak are still relatively new challenges (compare them with the timeframe of the iPhone challenges last year).  We’re making slow advances on both fronts, but it’s not the sort of thing that can be easily described in a blog like this.  

Making the iPhone and iPod touch harder to crack is, as far as Apple (and the chosen carriers) is concerned a good thing because it helps to keep users loyal to the App Store and the relevant carrier.

While I'm not under any disillusion that the next-get iPhone and iPod touch are unbreakable, I'm willing to place a small wager that Apple has built in some mechanisms to help it stay one step ahead of the crackers ... for a while at any rate.