Good news for those of us lucky enough to nab one of Apple's hottest commodities to date, the iPhone, and want to get down to some serious customization with the nifty little gadget: the good people at #iphone have successfully created a serial console working for the iPhone, giving you access to a fully-interactive shell. How's that for fan creativity?

This nugget of good news comes from Hackintosh forums user geohot. His post, verbatim:

Your friends at #iPhone made a major breakthrough this morning. We got a serial console working, here is how the serial has the same pinouts as iPod serial use a 6.8kish resistor from pin 21 to gnd tie pin 11-sergnd to the real ground use iphoneinterface to send the following commands in recovery mode:

setenv debug-uarts 1
saveenv
reboot
that should work

IT GIVES YOU A FULL INTERACTIVE SHELL
I REPEAT, A FULL INTERACTIVE SHELL

This vigorous announcement is followed by a link to the actual command list, and a reminder for the need of a level converter to make the entire process work. Now, as with all modifications, do it in your own risk, as any modifications can brick your iPhone. Now that's settled, click on the read link for the entire process, as well as the files needed. Enjoy your fully-interactive shell.