Click to View

Tomorrow, the iPhone will start shipping in the U.K.—at 6:02 to be exact. On the same day, Apple will also rollout firmware 1.1.2, the very same version included with the European iPhone, to all iPhone users (e.g. those in the U.S.)

Firmware 1.1.2 isn't supposed to bring much new (at least on the surface) to American iPhone users, as 1.1.1 did a month ago, with the Wi-Fi iTunes store, for example. Rather, it'll mostly deliver localized features to Apple's European customers, such as support for Cloud Wi-Fi hotspots in the U.K. and additional languages.

It is widely expected firmware 1.1.2 will block user from running third party applications once again, just as version 1.1.1 did when it was released. It took a little while, but hackers were able to jailbreak the latter upgrade.

No doubt they'll be working quickly do the same for the new one. Jailbreak is the term often used for hacking the iPhone to open it to natively run software or applications that run in the operator system and not through the Safari Web browser.

Fortunately, if you're one of thousands of people who've jailbreaked their iPhones, you can choose whether or not to install firmware 1.1.2 when iTunes presents the option to you. So if your happy with how your iPhone is currently running and the applications you’ve installed natively, may want to hold off on 1.1.2 , at least until after hackers jailbreak it.

This back and forth between Apple and hackers will likely to continue until at least February. When Apple said it would finally introduce a software development kit (SDK) to allow developers to create official third party applications for the iPhone.