The iPhone-Dev Team took eight ‘long’ days after the official launch of Apple’s new phone to come up with a tool that “jailbreaks” not only older iPhones, but also the new 3G one and iPod Touches. The Pwnage 2.0 tool allows unauthorized third party applications to run on the 2.0 firmware.

However, although capable of unlocking older iPhones, the Pwnage 2.0 tool does not unlock the iPhone 3G to allow it to run on unauthorized cellular networks. The iPhone-Dev Team continued to bring updates in the past days, and it probably won’t be long before the “official” unlocked iPhone 3G comes out as well.

But is the Pwnage 2.0 tool that useful? It is for those who wish to unlock their iPhones perhaps, but in terms of applications, Apple’s App Store brought 500 third-party applications to iPhone and iPod Touch users, 25 percent of which are free, which makes the Pwnage tool less “essential” at the moment.

For those who wish to try it, the best advice is to be very careful, as it may mess with your iPhone if you don’t know what you’re doing. The iPhone-Dev Team already addressed some issues signaled by some of the users and will continue to do so.  

Following Apple’s launch of the “wonder-phone” in 2007, the iPhone-mania took its “normal” course and hundreds of thousands of iPhones have been unlocked and adapted to any local carrier in the world. The phenomenon could be easily explained through Apple’s strategy to take all the time in the world to close deals with carriers.

Estimations at the time were that by the end of 2007, over 1 million iPhones had been unlocked. People in countries such as Kuwait and Uganda had their iPhones in place, despite the fact that Apple probably forgot to mention those countries on the “to do” list for the year.