Enjoying the prize

About unlocking the iPhone...

In one of my previous posts I mentioned my well earned prize for my activity at work in 2007. It was a brand new iPhone (OTB 1.1.2). For those of you who are not familiar with this, OTB means out-of-the-box and 1.1.2 represents the firmware version. What made this version different that others was the bootloader version (v4.6) - the most difficult to crack so far.
I was one of the most patience persons to have a not cracked iPhone as I did not agree with the idea of either a hardware unlock of the device nor with turbosim.
So there I was just minding my own business when someday the good news finally reached me: it was possible to unlock OTB 1.1.2 using software cracks! And so my quest to completely unlock my iPhone started - here. I do not want to even begin to say what research activity this process involved. I will however write about my experience - to sum up all steps taken in order to accomplish this. As an initial note, make sure that you have a wireless router that your iPhone can use to connect to the internet.

1. Connect the iPhone to the computer using iTunes and downgrade the firmware from 1.1.2 to either 1.1.1 or 1.0.2;
2. Jailbreak the newly downgraded iPhone;
3. Open Installer, locate the 1.1.2-1.1.3 OTB G-Unlock package (the one from ModMyPhone) and choose to install it;
4. Open Installer, locate the OkToPrep package and install it;
5. It is now time to upgrade the firmware back to 1.1.2 using iTunes (similar to point 1);
6. Of course, after the firmware upgrade you will see that the phone is still locked, however OkToPrep allows you to jailbreak 1.1.2. Read more here. This time you will need a small utility available here.
7. Is this all? Well yes, you can input your SIM card and you will see your iPhone connecting to the network. But you cannot send or receive calls. At this point in time I was almost prepared to toss it away. However one more question well placed offered me the solution: open Installer again, locate the iWorld package and install it. Afterwards, open the new icon and choose your home country (for me it is Romania).

Was this all? Yes for the most part. I still saw that the phone did not recognize my contacts from the SIM card, so I needed to install and use SIMPort in order to accomplish this. And there is one more catch: in order to install a package from Installed you need to use the original AT&T SIM card. This inconvenient stopped me from actually trying the various packages available for installation.

Other than that I am pretty satisfied with the device. It is really something else...