Brazilian iPhone 3G 'œunlock' works, world waits for iPhone Dev Team anyway

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 16 July 2008 21:17

Your IT - Mobility

So, it’s clear the iPhone Dev Team are close, but not there yet.

In terms of an unlock for the iPhone 3G, or Apple’s other iHandheld iDevices, the Dev Team says it has its best people working to unlock the iPhone 3G, in addition to jailbreaking it.

Unless you use a Turbo-SIM style device, there may not be any iPhone 3G unlocks soon, it seems they could take longer.

But some Australians couldn’t wait for an unofficial unlock and paid for an official unlock. The news came from Mac forum “MacTalk” where Australians with an iPhone 3G were wondering if an unlock would allow the iPhone to work with 3 Mobile.

This is important because 3 Mobile has the best value data plans around and competitive calling plans, so if you’ve spend anywhere from around AUD $700 up to $1000 to buy either the 8GB or 16GB versions, and then paid the unlock fee too, you then have a device that should work on any GSM network, worldwide.

And lest those prices sound like a lot, my iPhone 2G cost me AUD $850, so today’s “outright, unlocked” iPhones don’t cost that much different despite what Steve Jobs said about the iPhone being “half the price”.

Anyway, the official carrier unlock experiment to plug in a 3 Mobie SIM has proven successful, so if you have purchased an outright iPhone, you can use it with three, even if you’ve had to pay around or up to $1000 to get there.

The other big worry for many posters looking at the iPhone Dev Team’s blog, wondering when the new version would be released, is whether jailbreak software would come out for PC at the same time as it does for the Mac.

However it seems likely that a PC version will come later, forcing people to find Mac owning friends nearby who are happy to let you install an iPhone unlock tool on their Macs.

So, the waiting will continue for Windows users even if Mac users get a tool, so for some of us the wait will continue much longer yet.