Official unlock procedures

[Swiss Apple]

Hi all,
In a couple of weeks I would have completed my one year contract and my telco will give me a free unlock for my iPhone 3G.

The question is, how does that work? is it a code which you punch in or do you have to connect to iTunes??? the reason I ask is that I've already sold the phone and need to know what I should tell the buyer, and also whether the phone needs to still be registered to me at the point my provider performs the unlock.
Cheers

 

[garethjs]

Hi all,
In a couple of weeks I would have completed my one year contract and my telco will give me a free unlock for my iPhone 3G.

The question is, how does that work? is it a code which you punch in or do you have to connect to iTunes??? the reason I ask is that I've already sold the phone and need to know what I should tell the buyer, and also whether the phone needs to still be registered to me at the point my provider performs the unlock.
Cheers

You put the request in to your provider who submits your phones IMEI to apple and requests the unlock. The time taken for this can vary from an hour to a week depending on how efficient your carrier is.

Once this is done and the unlock has come through you provider should let u know by SMS.

Now here u have 2 options.

You can simply restore the phone via iTunes then at the end of the process iTunes will set the unlock flag onto the device and you'll see the "congrats unlocked message" via iTunes and then whatever sim u put in will work thereafter.

Alternatively put in a foreign SIM into your locked phone. You will see no reception. Connected to iTunes and sync. It will verify your imei and then the same as above will happen.

 

[Swiss Apple]

You put the request in to your provider who submits your phones IMEI to apple and requests the unlock. The time taken for this can vary from an hour to a week depending on how efficient your carrier is.

Once this is done and the unlock has come through you provider should let u know by SMS.

Now here u have 2 options.

You can simply restore the phone via iTunes then at the end of the process iTunes will set the unlock flag onto the device and you'll see the "congrats unlocked message" via iTunes and then whatever sim u put in will work thereafter.

Alternatively put in a foreign SIM into your locked phone. You will see no reception. Connected to iTunes and sync. It will verify your imei and then the same as above will happen.

Many thanks for your reply, so it seems that the unlock (via iTunes) can be done irrespective of who owns the phone.

 

[!!11oneone]

Can someone explain to me how the official unlock works, and why it's not vulnerable to the dev team?

As a non-programmer, I'd have thought the best way to do a third party unlock would be to mimic the official way, which is presumably also immune to firmware updates?

 

[mavis]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3GS (White, 32GB): Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16)

Because the official method requires verification from Apple's servers.

 

[!!11oneone]

Can't the phone be tricked in the thinking it's received the verification? Something between iTunes/the phone and Apple that fakes the verification?

Might be a stupid question, just interested in the mechanics of it...

 

[terraphantm]

I'm pretty sure the dev-team looked into that and decided it wasn't worth pursuing.