Steve Wozniak an advocate of iPhone hacking

Having reportedly cut in line to buy the iPhone 3G on the device’s launch day, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has now apparently gone one better and “pwned” his iPhone . Pwning allows full read/write filesystem access and installation of unofficial third party applications the iPhone 3G.

Wozniak can be seen touting an iPhone displaying a cartoon image of Steve Jobs throwing his hands in the air — the boot screen replacement delivered by the pwn process — in the image below.

The release of a revised open-source toolchain for compiling unofficial iPhone applications and the advent of a jailbreak method for the iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0 have breathed new life into the underground iPhone development scene. The importance of jailbreaking had been mitigated to some extent by the debut of Apple’s official AppStore and waning impetus for an iPhone 3G unlock.

Unofficial developers argue that Apple’s SDK is crippled with regard to much of the functionality that set the iPhone apart when first released. For instance, signed applications that run under Apple’s scheme lack the ability to run in the background, as many of Apple’s own applications — including the Mail program and Clock — do. Unofficial applications created under the jailbreak umbrella carry no such restriction.