Friday, July 11, 2008

iPhone 3G Unlocked & Jailbroken in Record Time!


Sorry AT&T, but it looks like your dinner is about to be eaten for lunch. Gizmodo is reporting that the iPhone Dev Team, the group of dedicated software developers responsible for being the biggest thorn in Apple and AT&T's side when it came to the iPhone unlocking and Jailbreaking. (Jailbreaking is the process by which an iPhone operating system code is opened to reading and writing to its internal ROM). The iPhone Dev Team has done it once again--and in record time no less. The 2.0 Firmware has yet to be officially released by Apple to iPhone 1.0 users and it has already been compromised. The current iPhone 3G is sim-locked to AT&T Wireless, which means that only sim cards from AT&T are supposed to be recognized by the phone as being valid which blocks users from making calls unless an AT&T sim card is inserted. In other words, you couldn't insert the likes of a T-Mobile SIM and make calls without the sim lock being disabled. This lock is usually removed by entering a special numerical code to remove what is referred to in the industry as a subsidy lock code. Most cell phones today are subsidized or paid for in part by wireless carriers to entice cell phone buyers to sign 1-3 year contracts in exchange for a substantial equipment discount. This year, Apple and AT&T came to a new selling arrangement where AT&T will pay Apple a subsidy for each iPhone activated on AT&T, unlike last year where there was no subsidy. Best guesses are that AT&T is paying about $200 towards the price of each iPhone bringing down the final subsidized price to $199/$299 for an 8Gb/16Gb respectively for a 3G iPhone. Apple sells more phones and AT&T gets more subscribers who have to sign a 2-year agreement before walking out of the store with thier shiny new toy. It is estimated that about 20% of all iPhones sold last year were never activated on AT&T and are deemed to be unlocked and activated on other GSM carriers systems around the world. Most current iPhone 1.0 users that are not using AT&T must have had their handsets unlocked and/or jailbroken to be able to work on alternate wireless networks. The good news is that now that the 2.0 firmware has been unlocked/jailbroken, those users can update their iPhones to the new 2.o firmware without losing thier unlocked status, and more importantly, take advantage the new App store, MobileMe (Which by the way is STILL MIA--offline! as of this posting) and other features like push email and MS exchange contact and calendar synch. R.I.P sim-locked AT&T iPhone 3G, we hardly knew you!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, that was fast! From what I heard, it was going to be difficult to unlock the new version. There must be lots of happy T-mobile iPhone carriers everywhere now!

Unknown said...

Awesome blog, Hass! I've been enjoying the posts. (Hi, Sugar.) Any word if Apple worked the bugs out of the voicemail? It has never worked with Bluetooth and I know quite a few people who have intermittent trouble with apparant cycling of the messages, where it looks like it is loading but never plays. Occasionally it will play with starts and stops, sometimes never finishing. Resyncing doesn't help. What's the deal?
Give my love to Tice.

M

Ameer said...

Fantastic ,good news is always well appreciated and it is always good to hear it from you .

Unknown said...

Good Post.

Unknown said...

Well. There are various ways to unlock an iPhone. But I always prefer an unlocking method which doesn't require a jailbreak. One of the unlocking method which doesn't require a jailbreak is Remote Unlocking Service through which I unlocked my iPhone. I got the remote unlocking service for my iPhone from SimpleUnlocking.com This method of unlocking was safe, simple, affordable, quick and permanent.