Mark McSpadden

I have an iphone. I have an iphone on tmobile’s voice and data network. I have an iphone on my home wifi network. I have an iphone.

How it all started

I was browsing through my feeds yesterday and came across this story about an open source effort to unlock the iPhone. As a very happy TMobile customer, I had never considered the iPhone within my reach, but now with an open source unlock and 4GB iPhones reduced to $299, I had to give this thing a whirl.

So I head over to my local Mac store, inquire about the refund policy (14 days, 10% restocking fee if opened), buy my 4GM iphone and then head home to do some more reading. After a little bit, I decide to eat the $30 bucks and unwrap the beautiful piece of machinery. (I’m a nerd, just the hours spent on the effort are worth that small price.)

The Resources

By the time I write this, there may be an installer available, but in case there’s not:

Mac OS X 10.4 and iTunes version 7.4

• iFuntastic_3.03
• iActivator
• Installer.app

Tutorial: http://iphone.unlock.no/

The hoop jumping

I am definitely not saying this will work for you. It did for me. If you brick your phone it’s your fault. (I’m not even sure you can brick your phone, you should be able to easily restore it, but disclaimers are cool and I wanted one.)

First I connected my iPhone to my Mac, itunes came up, I canceled out of the activation. Next I fired up iFuntastic and choose the “Restore” option. This is really nice since you start clean and it gives you a file to revert back to should things go crazy. I then tried to use the “Unshackle” feature, but was unsuccessful.

I then decided to try iActivator. It worked great and after following all their instructions, I had an activated iPhone.

Now that my iPhone was activated, I could add the Installer.app to it. After I followed all those instructions, I was ready to start unlocking. I hit the tutorial about half way through step 2 (obviously I used the mac Installer.app instead of ibrickr) and used Installer to install the 3 required packages.

Next I download the required files (oops, those are at the start of Step 2) and moved them to my iphone. I moved them not using the suggested method, but instead did something else. I first joined my iphone to my wireless network. Then I used ssh to login to my iPhone and test that piece of the puzzle. Then I used a mac program called sshfs that basically mounts a drive for you via ssh. After the drive was mounted, I just did a ‘drag and drop’ for the files and folders specified in the tutorial.

I then ran all the tutorial commands, without issue, and at the end, that’s right, an iPhone on Tmobile’s network. Pretty sweet.

Still in trial mode

I still have 13 days to evaluate this setup to see if it’s actually feasible to maintain against the firmware and itunes updates. I’ll be sure and keep you posted!