Best. Update. Ever.

Period.

Well, except for this.

As you may or may not know (mostly because satellite radio is still completely irrelevant to most people, for reasons we have discussed previously) the two big players in the game – Sirius and XM – recently completed their long-discussed merger. And, to not a lot of people’s great surprise, it hasn’t helped much. Sure, it stopped the fracturing of the market and the division of the consumer dollars, but that doesn’t help much when the market is pretty much dead in the first place.

However – and remember where you read this – next week SiriusXM and Apple will announce the migration of satellite radio to the very device that killed the market before it ever started: The iPod. On Wednesday we should see a small, simple, and cheap attachment for the iPod that will take satellite radio portable. The underpinnings on the iPod side of things were added in the latest version of the SDK so the interface should be pretty slick. Better, other developers are free to use the radio integration as well – se we may see some cool third-party uses of the satellite feed that drive even a few more sales.

Will this make enough of a difference to save satellite radio? Maybe – there are almost 80 million iPhone and iPod Touch units out on the street already. If the interface is good and there are attractive subscription incentives and even a fraction of those people subscribe, the industry could see it’s market share doubled or even tripled overnight.

Also, there is an outside but not-completely-unrealistic chance that when Apple splashes down the new iPod Touch hardware in September (just three days before the new Microsoft Zune) that there will be some sort of irresistible incentive to get iPod and iPhone owners to give satrad a try. Keep your eyes peeled and – if you are a fan of this particular struggling business – your fingers crossed.

Apple moved pretty quickly to patch the “text message” vulnerability that was revealed at the Black Hat conference this week. Look for Google and the Symbian people to get their own updates out within the next couple of days, but don’t hold your breath for a fix for the HTC phones that run Windows Mobile anytime soon. Next year, maybe. Kudos the the Black Hat geeks (who are generally cool and awesome) to dig this one up, and kudos to the gang in Cupertino for taking care of it in a hurry.

However, that is not the point of this post.

The point is that the 3.0.1 update makes a small but not trivial change to the baseband section of the iPhone OS, and if you have an unlocked or jailbroken phone, taking this update will hose it. No bricks or anything, but you will have to put your phone in DFU mode and do a full restore from your local firmware image, and the whole thing is a pain in the ass.

I will work up an OS file as soon as I can to account for the fix, but in the mean time: Do not update your iPhone if it is unlocked, and do NOT accept weird SMS traffic from sources you don’t know (which is not something I should probably have to tell you in the first place).