Markus

Have a look here. It contains a link to a YouTube video which alleges to show the iPhone using a standard T-Mobile SIM card.

Currently the unlock is hardware based, but they are aparantly reverse engineering things to allow for a software only unlock and they have stated they should be able to release a step-by-step, software only, guide to unlock your iPhone next week.

Markus

A little update on this. Geohot is, at 8AM EST today (less than 5 mins time!), going to do a step-by-step hardware unlock on the iPhone on his block. Hvae a read here.

Looks like the only hardware needed is a soldering iron, fine wire, and a switch. You will need to dismantle the iPhone, so bye-bye warranty. It seems to me that you're only going to have to solder the switch to one of the boards of the iPhone to get the unlock capability.

joey_turbo

iTrader: (26)

Thats very interesting.
This is what I love about the net. No matter how much something costs, there is always someone willing to messa bout with it.

Markus

From what I've read, seems it's not just a pure hardware unlock. The hardware bit is needed to get the phone to boot and not load something, you then get a patched firmware onto the phone and it's unlocked.

One presumes the pure software unlock will do whatever the hardware switch does when it's flicked.

I'm curious about the firmware side of things, as in, if Apple releases an update, how easy will it be for someone to patch the new firmware. I'd guess it's pretty simple, and that Apple won't change things around too much with the new firmware, and I doubt they can, as it's relying on very low level things.

Markus

Well, this could be it! Seems that the chaps at iphonesimfree have been able to remove the carrier lock on the iPhone via software. Have a read here

The key question I have, which they cannot yet answer is if it's bulletproof when it comes to updates from Apple. What they *should* have done, is to get a brand spanking phone, non-activated and non-updated, and get the chaps to unlock it. Then they could have tried jailbraking the phone, plus, more importantly, applying the latest update (1.0.2 I think) to the phone, and seeing if it was still unlocked. The jailbreak should be ok, but it's the update that might re-lock the phone.

If an update does lock the phone, then do they unlock it for free again, or will they charge (it's unclear wether they will provide the software to unlock to you or not), if they charge then how much this service is, intial and subsequent unlocks is rather important. To be honest, if they charge anything after the initial unlock then it seems a little greedy to me. Just make the initial charge a bit higher.