One of the things that many smartphones have in common is that there is a large community of homebrew fans and those making all sorts of cool and often quasi-legal apps for devices by hacking the firmware. Often these hacks are to add new features like tethering to phones that lack it or to free phones from single carriers.

The Pre has turned out to be one of the phones that hackers can really sink their teeth into. According to some reports, the Pre is more hackable than the iPhone and adding custom firmware is said to be easy to do with the device.

The open nature is one of the big draws of the Android OS and Palm is looking to offer some similar openness in its webOS. Apparently uploading a custom firmware is as easy as connecting the device via USB and holding down the volume up button while turning the Pre on.

[via Mirror.co.uk]