iPhone sold, unlocked

Decided to keep the ipod touch and so I sold the iPhone yesterday and it turned out somebody wanted a sealed box. Luckily, I resisted unlocking the phone just to make it sell more quickly. I handed over the iPhone to the buyer last night but her request was to assist her through the unlocking.

Now, to the uninitiated, unlocking the iPhone is daunting. There are too many instructions around the web, often with conflicting steps. If not, the directions would just be too dense, even for techies. The stress is compounded by the thought that a wrong move could render the iPhone inoperable (aka "bricking the iPhone).

The path we took to "jailbreak" the iPhone needed no computer sync. All we used was a wifi connection and the iPhone's Safari browser. Instructions are at http://hacktheiphone.com. Note that the unit had firmware 1.1.1 and the week was 39 (the week is the 4th and 5th digits of the serial number). So we used the deprecated instructions to jailbreak a 1.1.1 iPhone right out of the box.

The process took a little more than 30 minutes with some sweating and crossing of fingers.

Note that the new releases of iPhone will cause the phone features like calls and SMS to refuse to run in our country. Sources say these are units released after first week of Nov.