The Palm Pre Has Been Jailbroken

POST

MAIL

Posted June 12, 2009 at 7:23pm by Shalom Levytam

Steven Troughton-Smith has jailbroken the Palm Pre while at WWDC in San Francisco.

Well, success :-) I gave up Tuesday eve because I couldn't get the device into restore mode no matter what I did, but on Wednesday morning I figured it out: you have to hold the volume-up button while the device is off before plugging it into USB, and from there you can use Palm's firmware flashers to do whatever you like with it. As the device can run unsigned firmware (!!!) I was easily able to hack out the activation check, and get up and running and enable the root shell. In that respect, I may just have the first jailbroken Pre in existence.

Troughton-Smith says that for hacking, the Pre is incredible. It runs unsigned firmware, has root shell over USB, its entire UI and all apps are written in javascript, and you run write C/C++ native Linux apps.

Read More

Get the iClarified Daily Newsletter

Apple news, rumors, tutorials, price drop alerts, in your inbox every evening, free.

Unsubscribe at any time.

mlap - June 12, 2009 at 7:52pm

who cares about this piece of xiet

Braden - June 12, 2009 at 9:30pm

If you had a brain, you'd know it's not a crappy phone. It's quite good, actually.

Javier - June 13, 2009 at 10:06am

Dude, Show respect for others.. If you do not like, just ignore it.

Braden - June 13, 2009 at 1:55pm

Since when did we start claiming opinion as fact, hmm? For you, it might suck (although I don't see how. You're just being biased to the iPhone), but for others it is a good phone. As good as the iPhone? No. A good phone, nonetheless? Yes.