My Horrific experience to unlock Apple iphone 3g

Hi


After much thinking whether to chose between apple iPhone or android phone(google nexus one)

I settled for an i phone 3g simply because of it wide range of apps and also it had a high style value but still it had some minus points like no support for flash,camera pixel is less(3.2mp), no video recording available but not every phone is perfect :)

Android phones looked great but it is still in a nascent stage.

iPhone 3gs was also available the only difference was that it had video recording and a better camera the difference in price was around 100 dollars

But some Features like video recording could be done on iphone 3g by jail breaking

jail breaking means tampering with the code of iPhone os more details


I got the iPhone 3g from us from my sister about a month back. I think i saved around 15000rs the current price in India is around 31000Rs. I was told that it was a unlocked version so that i could use my Airtel network service usually iPhone models come with at&t network service it is not possible to use other networks unless you buy a factory unlocked iPhone


I do not understand why apple takes a long time to launch it products in India  iPhone 3g was released in 2008 in us and it's launch in India with Airtel and Vodafone was towards end of 2009

I was excited when the phone arrived in a neatly packed box but my excitement was short one

When i inserted my airtel Sim card it was saying no network service available and i was not able to go past the emergency call screen section

So i started a extensive research on net and found some favourable results which were little encouraging

My phone specifications were
baseband version 05.12.01
bootloader 6.4
firmware 3.1.3

i found out that first i had to jail break and then unlock

According to many forums I could jailbreak and use it as a iPod or itouch but cannot unlock it

When i connected the iPhone to iTunes software it was giving a message saying Sim is locked

There was no Unlock software available or released by iPhone Dev team(which Specializes in Unlocking) for the firmware 3.1.3 and bootloader 6.4 as apple increased the baseband signal to 5.12.01 in their latest upgrade

Many people who had upgraded their phones to the latest 3.1.3 firmware were also facing the same problem

one option was to downgrade from base band 5.12.01 to 5.11 but only if it is using 3.8 boot loader version otherwise it was useless

The hack is available with i phone Dev team but they are waiting for the i phone OS 4.0 and iPhone 4 to release so that they can try their new hack on it also.

I also went to the airtel guys official partner for apple for unlocking even they also couldn't unlock as the phone was purchased in the us.

i am lucky to be waiting for the unlock from about a month there were many who were waiting for it from past three months

i phone OS 4.0 is Releasing on 21st June or 24th June so right now keeping my fingers crossed :-)

I doubt whether snowbreeze or pwange tool or redsnow, blackra1 could help with unlocking and also did no want to take a chance with these so waiting for the official unlock tool from iPhone Dev team

If any of u want to jailbreak ur phone here is a guide

As of now I didn't do it(jailbreaking) But i am told It will work hundred percent

I enquired at Sangeetha mobiles and they were charging around 1000 bucks to unlock when the unlock releases  which is highly outrageous in my opinion

I lament my decision to buy the iphone3g now as iPhone 4 released and the price of iPhone 3gs has also come down and apple to decided to discontinue their iphone3g production now