Significant iPhone 3G unlock progress, no unlock yet

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 19 October 2008 11:29

IT Industry - Market

The iPhone Dev Team has announced “significant 3G progress” towards a 3G unlock, modifying iPhone 3G baseband and even running modified baseband code, but the unlock itself remains elusive.

The quest to unlock the iPhone 3G continues with the latest iPhone Dev Team announcement, and while no 3G unlock is yet possible, the Dev Team has made progress.

In a blog posting called “3G Update”, the Dev Team said: “We made some significant 3G progress this week.

On display is text on a screen, part of which says “PWNED PROFILE” above another called “STORED PROFILE”.

The Dev Team says it shows “a 3G iPhone whose baseband has been modified.  And even though it’s modified — and fails the integrity check — it’s still running.” 

They also ask: “Can you guess where the patch was made?”, although the answer to this isn’t clear.

The team continues: “Running modified baseband code is a very useful ability, but it’s still not possible to accurately estimate how close we are to the ultimate goal,” while a short video of the screen described above can be seen here, at the “homepage.mac.com” address of iPhone Dev Team member and blog forum moderator “MuscleNerd”.

So, while there is no non-Apple software 3G unlock yet, this is the first real sign of progress since the iPhone 3G was released and then jailbroken after a few days, although 2G iPhones have enjoy quick jailbreaks and unlocks soon after each new firmware version is released by Apple. 

It’s worth remembering that the iPhone Dev Team is working on the 01.45.00 iPhone 3G baseband firmware, with newer basebands yet to be tackled.

More information on this, details on how long previous iPhone baseband unlocks took compared to the as-yet unlocked 3G model and progress on the iPod Touch 2G jailbreak on page 2...