I just decided to buy an iphone and activate/unlock/jailbreak it, so i decided to read more about it before buying it, also reading about hacking the iphone in order to get it working in Jordan (Middle East) with ZAIN / Orange / Umniah. WTH?.. I discovered that the iphone is a science by itself!! and it is not easy to RTFM and users experience!. All what I found about hacking the iphone was through playing with its hardware, like adding a simcard socket to fake the iphone as if the mobile operator is AT&T.
Is it possible to activate, jailbreak and UNLOCK iphone? Yes, now it’s possible to activate, jailbreak and UNLOCK your 1.1.2 OOB or 1.1.3 OOB iPhone via SOFTWARE, with no strange SIM games or hardware trick (no need to open the iphone).
There are a lot of confusion. There are a lot of people who bought and iPhone but never messed up with SSH, freeBSD or not even used a command line before. So, I’ll try to give my 2 cents and explain a bit of basic concepts. You don’t need to understand this stuff to have a working iPhone, but you need to read these basics to avoid to post tons of comments with already answered questions, and it will also help you to understand what they are talking about in those comments and will help you to stay on the ball when 1.1.4 will come out and we will all be back at the beginning.
Point 1 - your iPhone is inactive, jailed and locked
When you buy your iPhone, it is inactive. This means, it will ask you to follow a procedure to activate it. If you don’t activate it, you’ll not be able to even listen MP3s on it. The standard activation procedure requires you to call your telecom company (AT&T in the united states, T-Mobile in Germany, Orange in France, O2 in UK), sign up a contract with them, and then obtain the code to unlock your iPhone via iTunes.
Even after you have activated it, it is jailed. This means that you cannot install on it any application. Apple decided that only Apple can produce applications for the iPhone. Then they changed their mind (when they saw that there were tons of applications for the iPhone and all the world was jailbreaking it), and are going to give developers all they need to write applications for the iPhone. But this has not happened yet.
Also, your iPhone is locked. It will be usable only with the SIM card provided by your telecom. From country to country the policy changes, and you will probably be able to use it with other SIM cards from other telecom companies, but since you need a contract with that telecom company you’ll probably stick with them long enought. Apple decided this probably because Apple will receive a certain percentage of your expenses in phone calls and SMS, somebody say it is 20% of your traffic going to Apple in exchange for the exclusive given to the telecom.
Point 2 - iPhone comes in many flavours
It’s easy to say “I have an iPhone”. Currently the iPhone itself is probably identical, what really changes is the software inside. The software of your iPhone is made up of many “components”, for the sake of simplicity we will divide it in only two parts : the “Boot Loader” and the “Firmware”.
The Boot Loader (BL for short) is a core component. Its job is to power up the iPhone, handle all the hardware details, and provide a strong foundation to the firmware.
The Firmware (FW for short) is everything fancy you see in your iPhone. Its job is to display a nice user interface, to contain all those nice applications like google maps, youtube etc.. But it will fall back on the BL when it comes to make a call, or check the battery status and everything dealing with the hardware.
It’s not exactly like this, but this is a good approximation. When you talk about “unlocking”, you are talking about an operation on the Boot Loader. When you talk about activating or jailbreaking, you are talking about an operation on the Firmware.
Now, there are at least 2 versions of the BL around. The old 3.9 and the infamous new 4.6. There are many versions of the firmware, at least the 1.0.2, the 1.1.1, the 1.1.2 and the 1.1.3.
More or less, you can run any firmware version on any boot loader version, except that firmware 1.1.3 needs some functions which are only present on the 4.6 boot loader, so it will not work correctly in a 3.9 boot loader.
Up to the week 45 of the year 2007 Apple shipped their iPhones with the BL 3.9, changing the firmware from 1.0.2 to 1.1.1 at a certain point, but keeping the same bootloader. Since the week 45, the iPhone is shipped with BL 4.6 and firmware 1.1.2. A small number of phones where shipped with the old 3.9 bootloader and firmware 1.1.2, but they are a few.
iPhones are defined called 1.1.2 (or 1.1.3 or whatever) “Out Of the Box” if they had that version of the firmware already installed by Apple, so they had that version when they were taken the first time out of the box. The big difference is that when you read 1.1.2 Out Of the Box (OOB for short), it means 99% BL 4.6 , while if it was a 1.1.1 OOB, the upgraded to 1.1.2, it stilla had the old 3.9 BL.
The problem is that, up until 3 days ago, the BL 3.9 was easy to unlock (remember, unlock = make phone calls with other telecoms), while the BL 4.6 was impossible or nearly impossible to unlock. Apple also updates the BL to the version 4.6 when you upgrade your iPhone to the new 1.1.3 version of the firmware (cause it does not work well with old BL 3.9), so everyone with a 1.1.1 OOB then unlocked and updated to 1.1.2, will find its phone locked again after the 1.1.3. Geeks say that their iPhone got “revirginized” after an 1.1.3 upgrade.
That’s way you always read messages like “Will it work on my 1.1.1 OOB 3.9 BL?” .. now you know what they mean.
Point 3 - activating, jailbreaking and unlocking
As explained there are different operations. Activation and jailbreaking both operate on the firmware, and that’s why usually when the hackers manage to activate a new firmware they also manage to jailbreak it.
Unlocking is a completely different story, it acts on the boot loader. Up to 3 days ago, the only way to unlock an iPhone with a 4.6 BL was to use a HARDWARE trick (that is, open you iPhone and make some contacts inside it) to DOWNGRADE the BL back to the version 3.9.
I will post as soon as I get my iphone on how to SOFT-fuck it in order to get it working in Jordan at least… stay tuned!