Smartphones are great for many users, especially those in the business world who can use them for tracking appointments and keeping connected with the office or that boss who likes to know where you are at all times. The catch is that many smartphones require you to be tied to one service provider for years and some people don’t like making that sort of commitment.

For the folks that eschew the contracts associated with your typical smartphone, Palm has announced that the Treo Pro unlocked smartphone is now available to purchase. Palm says that the unlocked smartphone allows users to take advantage of any network they want and even use local SIM cards when traveling abroad.

It’s hard to say how they did it, but it appears that somehow Telecom Italia Mobile has convinced Apple and Steve Jobs to offer the new upcoming 3G version of the iPhone to customers in Italy with quite a bit more leeway than we’ve seen here in the states. Not only will the iPhone not require that two-year service contract along with the purchase, but it will also come unlocked.

This is something that Apple has been very stringent about stateside and has been volleying versions with hackers since the beginning, keeping the iPhone locked and with a single, exclusive carrier. What this means is that in Italy customers can just by the iPhone and use it with any carrier that they choose.

For those who have iPhones unlocked by third party software hacks and were foiled by Apple’s 1.1.1 firmware release, it looks like the game is back on. SimFree version 1.6, from the same company that created the original hack to unlock Apple’s iPhone outside of the exclusive and required AT&T service plan, is a new countermeasure hack that gets around the new firmware update and will once again unlock those iPhones “bricked” by the 1.1.1 update.

According to iphoneSimFree, this new iPhone “jailbreak” will let anyone who has rightly been a little leery to update after Apple’s warning to safely go ahead and apply the 1.1.1 update and SimFree will keep the phone usable, at least until Apple comes out with another update.

Apple released the expected version 1.1.1 update to the iPhone firmware today with fixes for some critical bugs and the additions to support the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store. But what makes this release such big news are the less-known things in the update that threaten to brick unauthorized, unlocked iPhones.

Prior to the update Apple put out a warning to those with unlocked iPhones which basically stated that the next firmware update may render these unlocked phones useless, and the result is not covered by the warranty. With the new firmware update iPhone owners were presented on screen with the same message before installing the update: