Iphone activation vs jailbreaking vs unlocking

I read many articles on iphone and, from the responses, I found that some people are confused about the terminology. So, I am trying here to explain what each one mean.

Activation
Activation is the process of making the features in the iphone usable. Without doing activation, you cannot use most of the functionality. You can make only emergency calls without activating iphone. As part of the genuine activation process, you will have to sign up/upgrade for a 2-year contract from AT & T. You can tranfer your phone number to iphone if you are an existing customer.

JailBreaking
You cannot install any third-party application that you wish on your iphone. The process of breaking this restriction is called jailbreaking. Once you jailbreak your iphone you can install any third-party application developed for iphone. To go into more technical details, jailbreaking involves gaining access to the root file system. Those folders contain all the media related stuff. This is a pre-requisite for unlocking your iphone, because unlocking will involve loading some third-party applications on your iphone.

Unlocking
Unlocking is the process of making your iphone usable on networks other than AT & T. There are applications like AnySIM which is free and IphoneSIMFree which is paid, that can unlock your iphones. However, these applications work only on limited firmware versions. As of now, Out-of-the-box(OOTB) 1.1.2 firmware phones cannot be unlocked with these solutions. To go into more technical details, unlocking will involve modifying the baseband firmware to allow the iphone to work on non-AT & T networks. baseband firmware is the module that handles the GSM communications of the iphone.

How to find iPhone week number

Very simple.

Check the 4th & 5th digits of the serial number of your iphone. That will give the week of your iphone. For example if your serial number is 762482a9wf9, the week of manufacture is 48.

iphones shipped after 45th week cannot be unlocked, as of now

I bought an iphone planning to unlock it. But unfortunately, I discovered lately that my version of the iphone, out of the box (OOTB) 1.1.2, cannot be unlocked yet. After googling around I came to know that this is the case with all the phones shipped after 45th week. This is the case with the phones released in UK also.

It is because of the new bootloader and its enhanced security features. Previous bootloaders (3.9), due to a security flaw, used to allow the baseband firmware to be overwritten with an improperly signed firmware. But the new bootloader(4.x) checks if the baseband firmware is properly signed or not. Unlocking the phone involves replacing the default baseband firmware with a modified firmware which allows the phone to work on any carrier. We have to wait till the hackers find a way to fool the new bootloader and load a modified baseband firmware.

I read in some places that hackers found one possible way to change the baseband firmware on the OOTB 1.1.2 phones. But they are waiting for apple to release their latest 1.1.3 firmware, before they make their hack public. Hope our wait is not too long.