If you have an iPhone, you can now “jailbreak” – or hack – it very easily yourself by going to www.ziphone.org and following the instructions. I haven’t done it myself, but a friend of mine here did it and said it worked perfectly and took about two minutes.

Once you’ve hacked it, there is a new application called Fring (http://www.fring.com/fring_is/fringcubator/) that you can install directly on your iPhone and it lets you make Skype calls from your iPhone over a wi-fi connection. Theoretically, that means that if I’m in range of wi-fi, I can call people in the U.S. for 1.7 cents a minute or whatever the current rate is directly from my iPhone. However, I installed Fring this morning and then called my friend Anne in Atlanta, and the connection was not very good. I think the internet is just too slow in Vietnam for things like that to work very well – even with a strong wi-fi connection, the bandwidth is just not there. Hopefully this will improve over the next couple of years.

In any event, the first 3G iPhones are rumored to be being released in June 2008, and Vietnam is in the process of accepting bids for 3G providers here, so hopefully within a couple of years we’ll also have 3G here.