While the hacking must be interesting and rewarding in it's own right, does it have any practical advantage over running one of the existing Android phones? i.e., is there something uniquely good about the iPhone hardware combination?
It allows you to run iPhone OS alongside with Android OS?
At the same time? Surely not?
Nope. In fact the iPhone can't run Android smoothly due to its lack of physical buttons. In the original video, the hacker was using volume buttons for back/menu/home
And with android being open source, that can be fixed.
Well... hacked around, at least. I imagine it still makes a bunch of the apps in the market hard to use.
I'm looking forward to switching an old iPhone over to Android so that I can use my various accessories (namely, my stereo with iPod dock) with an Android OS.
If you're stuck with a phone for 2 years it's nice to have options. The lack of proper physical buttons is a problem though. I personally don't like these extra buttons on Android handsets. You've got a big touchscreen yet to use the phone in normal operation you have to switch between touchscreen and physical buttons -- sometimes quite often.