|
|
Latest iPhones now unlockable
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 11th February 2008
The software unlock: not a feature you'll likely hear Steve touting at the next MacWorld.
In a posting to his blog George announced on Friday that the “impossible has been done,” and claims full credit for the hack. Describing himself as spending much of Thursday “really pissed off,” George claims that he wanted to direct his anger towards something productive – namely a software-only unlocker for the latest iPhone firmwares.
I don't know what made George so angry, but it must have been quite impressive: it took him a solid 23 hours with only a couple of hour-long breaks in between. It was time well spent, however: after finding an almost identical exploit to the one present in older firmwares but shifted up the memory registers (George wonders if “Apple thought big numbers were harder to guess”) and working for a solid sixteen hours to find a way to boot his custom code, he'd cracked it.
Users who are running firmware 1.1.2 are advised to seek the 1.1.3 update elsewhere, however: the iPhone Dev Team---not to be confused with the real Dev Team who work at Apple and are rather unlikely to help you unlock your iPhone---is telling people to use their version of 1.1.3 and not to update via iTunes. With previous jailbreaks being broken in turn via iTunes-delivered updates this is probably good advice. If your iPhone came as 1.1.3 out of the box, then go ahead and run the unlocker – no problems have been reported.
iClarified has a good step-by-step guide to unlocking the handset for those who need a bit of hand-holding when performing operations that have a non-zero possibility of bricking their expensive handsets, or you can go ahead and get the package directly from GeoHot if you're feeling brave.
Does this make an iPhone more appealing to you, or is that only going to happen if they drop the price like a hot potato? Give us your opinion over in the forums.
Related articles on bit-tech.net
Comments (24)
Stats: 0.073 seconds
Makes the iPhone seem incredibly obsolete now.
the iphone was already obsolete when it came out..... spec wise....
Sure, plenty will buy it because it's sleek and they want to be "in" - I know a couple people where I work with iPhones have them for that reason. I got mine because it does everything I could want in a mobile device, and does them as well as I can reasonably hope for. Even if it only did email, phone, and web (and not iPod), it would still be worth the $400 to me. There are some compromises made of course, but IMO they make plenty of sense given the application of the device. Yeah, they could have done some slide-out keyboard, but that's a ton of wasted space and creating easily-broken hardware, blah blah blah. I'm not going to bore you with what Steve said a year ago, but having owned and used an iPhone since just about day one (and played with plenty of other devices in the meantime), I can confidently say that he was right.
The Macbook Air, OTOH... well, it's certainly beautiful, but I wouldn't pay more than $1200 or so for it. That took the hardware compromises a bit too far for me.
The more I think about it, the more I am of the opinion that the Macbook Air is receiving an unjustly bad press. As robust, compact and light laptops go, I can't think of anything that is better built. And the entry model is not that expensive compared to for instance Sony's thinware.
Look! Look! Keep your eye on the shiny thing!
No - Not the spec sheet - the shiny thing!
Windows Mobile is shocking. Despite it being the last OS I would ever want on my phone, I currently have a phone with it on. :)
...never getting another one though. Would love an iPhone purely for that interface but all the faffing around puts me off a bit.
I don't understand the attraction of the iPhone :(
Oooh... shiny!
Razr V3. Best. Mobile. Ever.
I'm currently very tied between having an iPhone brought back from the states for me, or going N95 8GB. I got to play with an original N95 over teh weekend and feature wise it's great, I just do not like Symbian that much. Sure I could learn to live with it, just the Nokianess of it all is so different from the SEs I've been using for 6 years.
I think feature-wise the N95 has me sold. I do so love the slickness of the iPhone but it's just not quite there for me specs wise.
I just have to wait for them to come to canada. I don't have any interest in having to hack my device to keep it working every update.
welllll, i just got an n95 8GB and so far, is totally awesome. to think i nearly sold it! if the iPhone had 3g, though, it would probably be a totally different story.
also! SEs and Nokia both run symbian.... yeah i know the interface is different but at the end of the day they have the same roots.
Yeah, I realize other companies have similar phones. I'm not as sure about their prices, though. Apple has a habit of only offering a few options for things - irritating with computers, but absolutely perfect for mobile plans.
No, I don't own an iPhone. Yet.