Unlocketh Thy iPhone

Woop-de-doo, but he hasn’t made it worth anyone’s while, has he? According to the BBC, George Hotz of New Jersey spent his summer trying to unlock the iPhone to be used on rival networks of AT&T, most notably T-Mobile.

However, the unlock isn’t as straightforward as simply “flashing” the memory on the iPhone, a more common way of unlocking a mobile phone to allow it to work on other networks. Instead, Mr. Hotz and a team of four others, including two Russians, spent over 500 hours since the launch of the phone working out how to hack it with a combination of software and hardware skills.

The software skills are possibly something you or I could do by downloading a program from the internet, most likely with a little tweaking, but what average Joe is going to spend his time with a soldering kit just to unlock a phone? If you’re up to the task, good for you, but unfortunately the rest of us have lives to lead.

Full credit to Mr. Hotz though; he’s publicly stated that he wishes there were a simpler way of hacking the iPhone and doesn’t want him or anyone else to earn money off of the hack—so while he loses points for wasting his summer in a beautifully hot (I’m jealous of British weather) country, he does gain a few from being quite modest about the whole affair.

But there is a simpler way

On Friday, 24th August 2007, Engadget announced that they had received information of a successfully unlocked iPhone without the need of a “hardware hack.”

A 6-man team has been working on the hack since the iPhone was launched on June 29th this year, but they refuse to tell us how they did it, most probably because they’re going to make a little earner out of this one, and quite rightly so. Engadget has posted a video to show us a little proof that the hack, by iPhoneSimFree.com, does indeed work brilliantly.

The hack takes a few seconds to do and does require you to activate the iPhone on your new carrier, in the demo’s case T-Mobile, which is a straightforward pain-free process.

There appear to be only a couple of downfalls to this little software “upgrade.” One is that the Visual Voicemail will not work, as expected, as that part of the iPhone is currently only an AT&T service, and the sedcond is that YouTube doesn’t work right out of the box, but will in time with a little activation (as posted on Engadget).

It took long enough but someone has finally done it.

So to those of you that already own the iPhone: what are you thoughts on this? Is there anyone out there who really didn’t want to subscribe to AT&T’s network and is disappointed that you didn’t wait for this so you could stay with the carrier you were on before you switched to AT&T? Or does this whole affair not bother you one bit? Let us know by leaving a comment or two below.