New year gift: Software unlock for 3G

Iphone-dev team has an exciting new year gift. Its going to release software unlock method for 3G iphone on new year eve. They had been working hard on this project under the codename 'yellowsn0w'. It is in the final phases of packing in a user friendly user interface. They are going to release a video demo of the same on around Christmas time. See their blog about this update. There are a two pre-conditions on which you can unlock your phone. It should have a baseband of version 2.11.07 or prior. It should be jailbroken. Jailbroken phone is a requirement because the 3G unlock software is distributed using the cydia installer which is available only on jailbroken phones.

Happy Christmas and New Year

Update: See the video demo of software unlock of 3G iphone

iphone screen output on TV

iphonehacks is running an article where it pointed out that the famous developer Erica Sadun has discovered that the recently released iphone firmware2.2 SDK offers an option to export video-out live to a connected TV screen. This is an undocumented feature in the SDK.

There is already a working prototype to prove that this thing works in real. See this video where the live camera is projected on a TV screen.


It does not stop here. Greg Hartstein developed an impressive prototype with on-screen controls where he can extend the iphone desktop to the tv screen. i.e you can use the tv-screen as additional space of your iphone. This is like extending the display of computer output to more than one monitors. Laptop users with windows operating system might be familiar how to extend their laptop screen to a standalone monitor. See this video which demonstrates the feature that I am talking about. Please be patient, it comes towards the end after showing some other interesting possibilites.

Linux on iphone

Like iphone ? Love linux ? Want both of them together ? Then your answer is here. A new project named "iphoneLinux" is going to achieve this. The project is in very infant stage right now. Currently, it provides only a command line interface to interact with the iphone sub-system. You can connect to a terminal over USB connection. The best part of this project is that your iphone becomes a dual boot system (like having windows and linux on the same system). At the boot time you can choose which OS you want to boot into.

For me, the enormous potential in this project is obvious. Speaking at a technical level, currently they have support for access to screen, serial driver, serial over USB driver, Interrupts, MMU, clocks etc. But all the special features of iphone are yet to be brought under the hood. Currently there is no support for wireless networking, touchscreen, sound, accelerometer, baseband etc. Do no slam it down saying that this is useless. It is just about matter of time when they will be supported.

BTW, they are recruiting people for the project. If you are good at kernel hacking and type of guy who figures out things on you own, you can put your head in it. Keep track of their informal blog to get updates about the project.

See this video which shows the boot options and commands in linux terminal.

iPhone Linux Demonstration Video from planetbeing on Vimeo.

Vietnamese hacker unlocks 3G iphone using hardware method

A quick round up before going into the details. There is no software method to unlock the 3G iphone yet. The iphone-dev team is working hard and getting closer day-by-day. They were successful in replacing the baseband on the 3G iphones, but it seems that the procedure had some problems. They want to release a robust solution as a software method to unlock 3G iphones. See their team blog for updates.

There is a SIM-based solution also to unlock the 3G iphone. Many people call this hardware method, but I would like to call it SIM-based solution as this approach does not involve opening the iphone and playing with the chips/circuits. This is first done by Brazilian hackers. It involves a wafer-thin card that piggybacks on your SIM and fooling the iphone into thinking that it is a test SIM thereby allowing any carrier. But they are selling this solution at a very premium price of $250-$350.

Coming to the main topic of this post, iphonehacks is running an article which says that a vietnamese hacker is able to unlock 3G iphones using a pure hardware method. It involves removing the baseband chip from the motherboard, reading the contents of it, reprogramming the chip with modified data, and then putting it back on the motherboard. Sounds exciting, isn't it ? I feel that he is generous because he charge only $80 for the whole process which takes about an hour.

The above two solutions (SIM-based and hardware method) does not work with the 2.2 firmware on 3G iphones because the firmware upgrades the baseband. This creates one more challenge to the hackers and puts apple ahead in the cat-and-mouse game. The upgrade of baseband with the 2.2 firmware happens only on 3G iphones. I seems that there is no way to downgrade the baseband once it gets upgraded. So, think twice before upgrading your 3G iphones to the latest 2.2 firmware.