Cristiano on Tech/Life

Obviously I didn’t get a contract with my brand new iPhone, simply because I don’t have the budget to spend £35 a month on a contract. Maybe in the future I will buy a contract anyway, but for now I am basically stuck with my expensive Dutch contract. In other words: I had to hack my iPhone. With doing this I ran into some issues, which I will try to highlight in the following article, giving some reference for all you other people that are thinking of buying a UK iPhone.

Defining “UK iPhone”

Let’s start by quickly explaining what I mean with the “UK iPhone”. This is kind of important as there are different iPhones out there. With the UK iPhone I mean the iPhone that is currently (January 1st, 2008) sold in the UK that ships with the 1.1.2 firmware (see here to learn how to check firmware you have). iPhones shipped with this firmware Out Of the Box (commonly called OOB or OTB) ship with a new bootloader/baseband. This new bootloader has some repercussions that I will get to later.

Everything I will tell in this article might also hold for the US, German, or French 1.1.2 OOB phones, but I don’t know for sure because I don’t have these phones.

Buying

I bought my iPhone in the Apple Store in Regent Street here in London for £269. I had to pay with a credit card, which you might see as a security issue, but I don’t think it is. They also wanted some of my details, which I didn’t want to give obviously. The guy filled in some bogus details instead, so I guess it wasn’t that important. I haven’t gotten any message about why I haven’t “activated” my iPhone, and I don’t think I will ever get one.

Activation

Before you can use the iPhone, you will have to activate it through iTunes. But to do that you need to buy the expensive O2 contract you don’t want to buy, so this is not really an option. Firmware 1.1.2 is not hackable at the moment, but people found a solution by forcing iTunes to restore your firmware to 1.1.1 which can be “HACKtivated”. After this you can then do a hacked upgrade to 1.1.2 and use all the new features.

In other words: you can easily activate and use your UK iPhone as a sort of iPod Touch without any phone features. The easiest way to do this is to follow this extensive tutorial here. This tutorial uses the TIFF exploit discovered in firmware 1.1.1 to activate your iPhone (Apple swiftly patched this exploit in 1.1.2, which is why you will have to downgrade to 1.1.1 first these days). The tutorial works by using the site jailbreakme.com (this also works for an iPod Touch), which also Jailbreaks your iPhone.

Jailbreaking

So besides activating your iPhone, Jailbreakme.com (as the name says) also Jailbreaks your iPhone. What this does is opening up your iPhone for installing new applications on it. It does this by pre-installing Installer.app on your iPhone, which allows you to download and install different packages (much like tools like APT for Linux do) which allow you to do cool things like have an MSN client, or a Twitter/Jaiku client on the iPhone.

Some people might not want to Jailbreak their iPhone, but only activate theirs. This is perfectly possible, but I have no idea how. I wanted to install more applications so I used this method. For warranty issues surrounding Jailbreaking see the section on warranty.

Unlocking (a.k.a Using it as a Phone)

So the real reason you bought the iPhone is to obviously have the perfect phone. The truth is though, that at this moment you can’t use the UK 1.1.2 OOB iPhone with just any sim!. The reason for this is that the new bootloader/baseband firmware is virtually unhackable. In the past you were able to patch the baseband firmware using tools like AnySIM to make it accept any sim card, but unfortunately the new baseband is inaccessible, so you can’t use AnySIM software. Whatever you do, don’t try to use AnySIM on a 1.1.2 OOB iPhone as it might lead to having to restore the entire phone again.

There are some hopes though for unlocking this iPhone. The upcoming 1.1.3 firmware will probably also ship with an update to the baseband firmware. This means that by looking at this update, hackers could figure out how to do the same thing and patch the firmware with their update. This is probably why most hackers have given up on trying to hack the current baseband and just wait for the next update.

If you don’t want to wait, there are some options though. First of you can always use a UK O2 sim in your iPhone as it is only locked to the O2 sims, not to the iPhone in particular. I bought an O2 Pay&Go sim and it worked after a bit of tweaking. Somehow I had to go through the entire restore to 1.1.1, activate, upgrade to 1.1.2 process before it worked. Probably you will have to do this because even the hacked activation process needs to be done with the SIM you want to eventually use. There are some workarounds but they didn’t work for me.

You don’t get EDGE on Pay&Go (just GPRS), but with a bit of tweaking you could even get that to work on the iPhone. Beware that I do not know if a German 1.1.2 OOB iPhone will take a UK O2 sim, or vice versa. Maybe someone could confirm this for me?

A second option is to buy a pre-programmed SIM like TurboSIM. Although expensive, they do work and will probably always work, whatever Apple does to the iPhone firmware. The idea behind these sims is that you attach them to your normal sim, and together they will let you call over your own network, while pretending to be an O2 sim to the iPhone. There are a few brands of these sims, but I would stick to the original TurboSIM or the so called StealthSIM. It seems that most of the other brands are either fake or just rebranded TurboSIMs.

Warranty

I took this shot below at the Genius Bar a while back when I was there to get my Macbook fixed. It has some interesting details. To sum things up:

• Your iPhone can only be serviced in the country where you bought it. In other words, a UK iPhone can not be fixed in Germany, even though this is very unlike Apple, and even weirder as both countries sell iPhones.
• Whenever you hand in your phone they will restore your firmware, meaning it will lose all third party applications and unlocking software you might have used. Obviously, as long as the current firmware your phone uses is hackable, this is a non-issue.
• The third point in big capital letters is a warning from Apple saying that software like AnySIM might lead to your phone being bricked when restoring the firmware. I recommend to always restore your phone to default if possible before handing it in to Apple, as you never know if they might break it. A bricked phone will not be fixed by Apple which means you either have to do some hardcore hacking (a.k.a. googling for help) or be seriously screwed.
• Now, the final point says something about the software license agreement (SLA). Somehow just putting your own software on the product breaks the SLA, but to void the warranty that software has to really “damage” your iPhone. As I read it this means that as long as you can return your iPhone to default, they can’t figure out that you ever put other applications on it, so they would have to see you as a valid customer. Even better: if there is a clear hardware failure and you have 3rd party software installed, I can’t see why that would break your warranty.

I think this sign not that clear about wether or not they will help you if you come in with a fully modded iPhone, loaded with a variety of third party applications, and having a non-software issue. On the other hand, if you were able to restore your phone to default firmware, they would probably help you, maybe even if it was HACKtivated. One thing that is definitely clear is that if somehow your iPhone got bricked, it is really your fault and not theirs.

Wrapping Up

It was a lot of work to get the iPhone working as I wanted, and I did run into some issues that weren’t clear to me before hand. Most of those issues are covered above, so read them carefully. I really love the iPhone and love how stable even the current third party applications run. I guess this article will expire quickly though as firmware update 1.1.3 is just around the corner, and only God (and Steve) know what will be announced at MacWorld 2008 this 14th. So if you read this article after these events, keep in mind that the iPhone world is a very fast moving world.