We’ve read some points in the comments that we would like to formally reply to, and of course we like to keep you updated with our progress and keep you “in the loop”.

The iPhone 3G came out on Friday the 11th of July (a little over 5 days ago).

We had hacks and exploits in our toolbox that we were pretty sure would work on the retail 3G device and not only pre-release devices (these exploits form the basis of the Jailbreak and Pwnage system) so we needed to test these out on real hardware that we’d bought in the stores, our guys in North and South America had to get hold of these devices in the usual way (by driving long distances and queuing up in the stores) and our guys in Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia needed to obtain devices from further afield (one example is a 3G device being personally couriered from Switzerland).

Once the hardware was in our hands the distributed work effort could begin (we reported on our first initial tests being successful on the 11th of July), various members of the team worked on different parts of the hack, they worked on elements that could speed up the packaging of the hack into something that we could deliver to you. The hack that we use is then tested and incorporated into PwnageTool and bugs and glitches are ironed out, these are non-trivial bugs these are the kind of bugs that can brick your phone, we don’t release stuff that we feel will risk your device, we want to make sure that everyone can use it properly and be happy.

We are not holding back on a release to make a UI prettier, we are not working on drop-shadows, pretty UI elements or color-schemes, we know a fantastic graphic artist that just deals with this stuff for us, so we don’t waste any time there, we are just making sure that everything is OK, everything is tested and everything is safe,  also the posting of videos and blogging doesn’t use any time as videos are taken in “down time” when we are celebrating progress or a specific achievement (remember how we said this is a hobby and fun), video making, blogging and other public facing activities come second, the real work comes first.

Just remember 5 days isn’t a long time in this type of technology area, in the corporate world fat grumpy middle-managers and overpaid PMs would be just about ready to think about scheduling a “kick off meeting” in their outlook calendars, or in some less crufty organizations the first milestone of “open the iPhone box” would have been more or less completed, but here we are almost at the end of a cutting edge distributed extreme-programming project with many hundreds of man hours already invested.

We are almost there. Those bugs are being swatted. Please fasten your seat-belts.