You probably know that installing a copy of the new iPhone 3.0 firmware that you grabbed off a torrent site is illegal, but you should also know that it's a royal pain in the butt. Users on iPhone forums are discovering the hard way that a copy of 3.0 is no good unless you're a registered developer, so it can be unlocked on your device. Otherwise you're in for a world of hurt, with hacky workarounds that require you to turn off your Internet connection every time you want to use your phone with iTunes.

Once you've gone to 3.0 without registering, it turns out to be really hard to go back. Users having trouble downgrading back to the current version of the firmware are all over iPhone forums, annoying legitimate developers (or their friends -- each dev can apparently sign up 100 devices) with questions about restoring to the old version. Meanwhile, the iPhone just throws a bunch of errors at them. I'm sure a way to restore will pop up soon, but if it doesn't, you could be holding a brick until the official release. Is it really worth all this trouble to avoid waiting a few months for copy and paste?

Note: Gizmodo has a step-by-step guide to downgrading.

Microsoft announced some updates to its Zune media player lineup this week, with new smaller, flash memory based Zunes coming soon. But we're much more excited about the software updates.

Microsoft has revamped both the Zune firmware and the Zune Desktop software. Perhaps the most impressive thing is that if you've got a current generation Zune, you'll be able to upgrade your firmware to get all the new features. Really, that's shouldn't be so impressive, but considering Apple wants you to buy a new iPod every year, it does kind of make the Zune slightly more attractive than it had been.

So what's new?

• The Zune Marketplace is adding over a million DRM-free MP3 tracks. This from the company that practically (but not really) invented DRM.
• Podcasts and music videos are being added to the Zune Marketplace
• You no longer have to listen to shared music within three days. But you can still only listen to a shared track three times before it self-destructs.
• You can share videos and photos with other users, not just music
• Support for additional codecs including h.264 and MPEG-4
• Automatically import recorded TV shows from Windows MEdia Center
• Microsoft is launching a social network called Zune Social
• Microsoft is launching web widgets called Zune Cards that let other users see your music selections
• You can share music that someone else shared with you

While Apple is busy pushing out iPod updates that make your (admittedly hacked) devices less useful, Microsoft is actually releasing updates that make the Zune better. Suddenly that brown media player doesn't look so silly, does it? Oh, right, Microsoft is killing the brown version.

Apple has released a software update for iPhone users, and there's good news and bad news.

The good:

• There's an iTunes Wi-Fi music store that will let you purchase and download media directly from you device
• Support for TV-out
• Louder speakerphone and receiver volume

The bad:

• If you've unlocked your phone, you may be out of luck.
• You'll need an AT&T SIM to re-activate your phone after the update.

In other words, if you've already unlocked your phone, we recommend waiting until the iPhone Dev team (the folks who released the unlocking software in the first place) publish an update before installing the new software. Or you could just decide to live without the new features.

Apple has updated iPhone's Firmware with v1.0.1 and is now available through iTunes.

The new update fixes bugs and closes the big Safari security breach that was discovered in early July. The Safari bug was said to have the ability to take control of the iPhone through visited malicious web pages. Something that we are sure Apple users would not appreciate, so plug your iPhone in, and boot up iTunes.

For a complete technical rundown of what Apple has updated, check out the update document.

[via gizmodo]