At first, Chris Pollock‘s hack to connect his iPhone to a computer’s serial port seems like a “because I can” sort of project, but in reality, it appears that it’s actually incredibly useful.
Why? Chris apparently works in IT, and as it turns out, a jailbroken iPhone armed with a serial port connector and many of Cydia’s console packages is a godsend for an IT worker: it’s an entire computer that you can just whip out of your pocket in a pinch to do some mainframe troubleshooting.
Fantastic. Now if only your could use this serial port hack to sync through iTunes.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
