Hasta La Gadget!

From the department of "Because We Can" comes Linux on the iPhone. Don’t get too excited — you won’t be running Ubuntu or Google’s Android OS on your iPhone any time soon (even if you wanted to). Here it is in action:

Right now, as you can see, this is strictly a proof of concept — there’s no actual interaction with any of the iPhone’s input methods. No touch screen, no nothing. Instead, the iPhone runs a USB client which lets you type in commands from another computer via the dock connector.

Still, it’s a good start, and once somebody slaps a few hardware drivers and a graphic user interface on there, it could be fun to play with. We’re actually more interested with the keyboard side of this hack. Would it be possible to run the regular iPhone OS and hook a keyboard directly into the dock connector? That would be killer useful for getting some real work done on the iPhone. It would also destroy my excuse for not blogging when I’m traveling, so maybe it’s not such a good thing after all.

Linux on the iPhone! [Linuxoniphone via TUAW]