Adventures in unlocking the iPhone up to 1.1.3

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 23 February 2008 10:18

Your IT - Mobility

The new easy-to-use 1.1.3 iPhone unlock, which even works with brand new iPhones never before unlocked, comes courtesy of a clever fellow called Zibri and the fellow behind the i.unlock.no site.

Zibri had created a command line utility that made unlocking easy, but the i.unlock.no guy then created a simple GUI (graphical user interface) for both Windows and Mac to make the process ridiculously easy.

The first step, besides making sure you’ve synchronised your iPhone to back up your photos, contacts and other information, is to fire up iTunes, and update the phone to 1.1.3, even though we’ve been warned against this in the past. Once complete, exit from iTunes.

Then you need to go to the ZiPhone download site, and download the free ZiPhone unlock software.

Once downloaded, you open up the file which then extracts itself. I chose not to double click it but used WinRAR to extract the contents into a new folder. I did it on a PC running Vista, so Mac users will likely just need to double click.

Once there, double click on the file called ZiPhoneGUI. Once it has loaded, connect your iPhone to your computer, if it isn’t already.

You now have four choices – the first lets you ‘do it all’, which activates the iPhone, jailbreaks it and then unlocks it for use with any GSM SIM card.

This is the option I chose, with white text on the iPhone screen going through the unlock process (something that’s normal) and after about 4 minutes, as advised on screen, my iPhone was unlocked and working.

All those juicy 1.1.3 features, including the ‘Locate Me’ feature of the upgraded Google Maps, the wriggly icons and all the rest were there and working! I could have stopped here, and you can too, but let’s keep on going, because what I did next made me think I’d stuffed up my iPhone.

The second, third and fourth options I didn’t use, but I’ll briefly document them here anyway.

The second option in ZiPhone is called ‘don’t unlock’ – this option activates and jailbreaks the phone only, and is recommended for people who have an iPhone from AT&T, Orange, O2 or Deutsche Telekom, and don’t need to unlock the phone – although that said they might want to do this in the future if overseas travel is on the cards and you want to use a SIM from the country you’re visiting to avoid those super-expensive roaming charges.

The third option is just called ‘Jailbreak’, and this is for the iPod Touch, although I think it’s not yet ready for 1.1.3 iPod Touches, as Zibri’s blog mentions he is still working on it.

The fourth option is ‘Refurbish’, which restores the iPhone to a locked state.

So, although it all worked fine, what were some of the problems I encountered because of continued fiddling? Please read onto page 3.