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On New Year's Day the iphone Dev Team released version 0.9.5 BETA of their yellowsn0w unlocking software. Just had a nose at it and the interesting part is that it's a soft unlock that you install on a jailbroken iPhone. You add an apt source in Cydia and away you go.

It's been coded as a daemon that runs at boot time which means that it doesn't have to exploit holes in early versions of the baseband code and it'll work on the 2.2 software that is available from Apple (after you quickpwn it).

The application is a small daemon that is launched on boot. It injects the payload at boot and also whenever there is a baseband reset. You won’t notice anything about it other than that your third-party sim now works. It’s a small program and unobtrusive...


More info here:

http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/67797811/dont-eat-yellowsn0w

I finally gave in to temptation and jailbroke my iPhone about two weeks ago. It's a 3G iPhone running 2.1 firmware. I followed the following guide that is suitable for OSX:

http://www.iphone-hacks.com/forums/about1709.html

The Monty Python'esqe pointy hands were a great help!

The only problem I encountered was that I needed to have iTunes able to connect to the Internet and to my iPhone at the same time which made it difficult as I was using my 3G Internet dongle to access the Internet at the time and the fat USB dongle covers the second port on the side of the Powerbook.

All in all it took about an hour to get it all done. I've got two firmware files as a result. One is the original Apple firmware that I can return to at anytime and the other is the Pineapple firmware that is installed.

Jailbreaking the iphone has given me access to Cydia. It's a gui for the ported Debian apt-get package management system and is great. It's like the App Store but it's all free! One of the first things I installed was OpenSSH so I can now get onto the iPhone over the network and fiddle with things.

At the moment the big plus points are:

1. All of the App Store apps work - I can still use the App Store if I need to too.
2. I can install my own themes and customise them to my heart's content. Boss Prefs and Winterboard allow me to show/hide icons, move things around, customise text etc.
3. SwirlyMMS brings picture messaging to the iPhone. Just got to persuade O2 to enable it on my account but that's a story for a different day!
4. I've got a Bluetooth on/off button on the front screen. This makes toggling Bluetooth much easier so I can get a lot longer out of the battery.
5. I could use the iPhone as a modem if I wanted to. The modem apps on the iPhone create a SOCKS proxy that you can connect to over an ad-hoc wireless network. Not tried it yet but can't see why it wouldn't work.
6. The FStream app allows me to stream BBC Radio streams meant for Windows Media Player
7. I can go back to Apple's firmware at a moment's notice.
8. Macman is great!

Note: If you want to Jailbreak your iPhone and your brick it then on your own head be it! I'm not responsible if it goes wrong!

Note 2: This is jailbreaking, not unlocking. It will allow you to customise the iPhone and the apps that are on it but it won't allow you to use a different mobile provider's SIM card in your iPhone.