After months of waiting I finally got my grubby little hands on a shiny new iphone when a friend brought me one back from the States. For those who have managed to avoid the media frenzy over this latest and greatest gadget, the iphone is Apples new mobile phone, emailing, web browsing ‘toy’. It is a quad band gsm phone, has wi-fi so you can surf the net anywhere with a wireless internet connection and has been available in the USA since July but only on the mobile provider AT&T’s network.

It is due to be released in Europe around the beginning of November but will be locked to the provider Apple has signed an agreement with in each country. Such as 02 in the UK and Orange in France. This will of course make roaming internationally very expensive as anyone who has spent travelling will understand.

Fortunately there have been a lot of clever people working on breaking the ‘Lock’ on the phones so that they will work with any provider. They had just succeeded when Apple released a new version of the phones software that broke all of these ‘hacks’. I was lucky that my friend picked up the phone a few days before Apple released their 1.1.1 software update. As my phone had the previous 1.0.2 firmware I was able to ‘jailbreak’ (access the phone so that you can add new software) and ‘unlock’ (so you can use any sim card) using the tools and techniques developed by the amazing iphone dev wiki team and more specifically the step by step instuctions for Mac OS X from modmyiphone.

The unlock process took about an hour and there were a few steps that I had to repeat until they worked. The most frustrating part for me was running the AppTapp installer. This Mac OS X program loads an application called installer.app on your iphone that can then be used to download the remaining tools directly over the phones wi-fi connection. Because our internet connection on the boat is rather slow at times and the AppTapp program involves a 90Mb download it took a while to complete.

So far I have tried Italian, Spanish, US and UK sim cards, and all have worked flawlessly. They are all pay-as-you-go cards so do not have an Edge GPRS internet connection, but as the iphone has wi-fi this has not proved to be a problem.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 7th, 2007 at 3:00 am and is filed under Phones, iphone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.