"I wouldn't get too excited," says Andy Wigley, a Microsoft device application development MVP and a principal with a British programming shop, APPA Mundi Ltd, in Birmingham, U.K. "This isn't a jailbreak as far as I can see. Simply, this guy has uncovered the way that privileged app developers (such as the phone manufacturers and network operators) are able to run C++ code on the device to access some bits of the platform that your average code developer can't."

"It's no surprise to me that native code will run on the device," Wigley says. "Underneath it all, the Windows Phone OS is still derived from Windows Embedded Compact Edition, and those of us who used to do Windows Mobile 6.x development have *plenty* of experience of interoperating with native code to do things that weren't possible from the C# libraries."

"What's contained in [Walsh's] blog post is very much an example of a developer accessing a private API," says Windows author and programmer Kevin Hoffman, whose day job is chief systems architect at Oak Leaf Waste Management, East Hartford, Conn. "He's found some 'undocumented' conventions that Samsung used in order to access low-level security APIs not found in the version of the .NET Framework (Silverlight) running on that device. This isn't jailbreaking -- it's just connecting OS-level features ([in this case,] COM-based DLLs) with Silverlight-based apps."

About the only thing everyone agrees on is that any Windows Phone 7 application that tries to use Walsh's technique will never make it through Microsoft's Marketplace certification process, precisely because the app is trying to do something that's forbidden.

It's also not clear that Walsh has gained anything like "root access" (and he apparently has not claimed this), meaning completely unrestricted access to the OS. In any case, Hoffman argues, you don't need root access to jailbreak the phone. In fact, the reverse is the likely scenario.