What with its open source operating system and developer-friendly nature, cracking open phones running Google's Android was always going to be easier than the full-on assault that was required to hack the iPhone, but we're still impressed by the speed with which hackers have broken the T-Mobile G1.

First is full access to the file system on the phone. This part is easy, but you could potentially break everything with an errant rm -r. You need to grab PTerminal, a command line tool, from the Android marketplace. From there, you navigate to your system/bin folder (where the binaries are kept) and type telnetd to launch the telnet program which lets you login to the phone remotely.

Assuming your Wi-Fi is switched on, you can now type netstat to get your IP address. From there, you just grab a computer on the same network and telnet in. You now have root access to the entire file system. This is the dangerous part, and it's odd that telnet runs this way. The root user, or superuser, is the God of the computer and can do anything, so proceed with care.

This means that one of the big G1 problems has been bypassed. Off the shelf, you can't install applications on the SD card, only in the G1's internal memory. Using this method, you can put applications on the SD card and point the phone at them. According to a post on the Android Community forums, this works just fine.

Aside from putting applications where you want them, root access to the OS means that a carrier unlock should be possible, meaning that you can use the phone on any supported network. On the same forum thread, user Shebanx, claims to have done just this, and although he used a third party unlock service, he claims that all the Google Apps still work (Gmail, Calendar and so on).

It's a great first step, and we can be sure that, as Android is a Linux-based operating system, there's going to be plenty more where that came from. Bring it on!

Android Jailbreak, first steps forward !!- get root access to your G1 [Android Community]

How to get Root on the G1 [XDA Developers Forum]

G1 is Jailbroken [ModMyGphone]