AT&T was nice enough to finally allow those of us who have had to pay about $2400 for the privilege of using an iPhone on their network for the last two years the opportunity unlock our devices. It is about time AT&T stepped up on this one. Well, as soon as I read the statement from AT&T, I was all set. I have a 3Gs and a 4 that I have wanted to unlock since the day they were off contract. As you have seen in one of my previous posts, I have been able to successfully unlock my 3Gs and use it (with a couple minor issues). However, I would really prefer to do it legitimately, and maintain Apple supported updates.

First, about the unlock process. It is actually Apple that does the unlocking. AT&T sends the request to Apple, but Apple actually does it. Once your phone is unlocked, you just need to restore it, and when it goes through what is usually the activation process, it unlocks the phone and presents a message stating as such in iTunes. One thing to note, if you had you had your phone warranty replaced by Apple, AT&T will need to contact Apple to approve the unlocking. Apple will only unlock the phone, if AT&T tells Apple it is ok. I was able to have the AT&T representative place me on hold while she contacted Apple and told them it was approved to make sure the process went smoothly. The AT&T representatives were actually very helpful and a pleasure to deal with. Something, I absolutely did not expect. It was a pleasant surprise.

I have been able to successfully unlock my jailbroken iPhone4. I did have some minor complications, but it all stemmed from the fact that my hosts file had been modified (gs.apple.com) during some of my jailbreaking adventures.

I was running 4.3.3 on my iPhone. I restored/upgraded the phone to 5.1, after commenting out the gs.apple.com entry in my /etc/hosts file (MacOSX Lion). Once restored, I got the message in iTunes telling me I had successfully unlocked my phone. So, I have a newly updated iPhone 4 running IOS 5.1 unlocked.

My next challenge is getting my iPhone 3Gs 5.01 baseband 06.15.00 updated to IOS 5.1 unlocked. Unfortunately, I think I have passed the point of no return with that device, because the baseband is a iPad baseband. It was the only way I could unlock the phone at the time. Thanks for that one AT&T.