If you are in India and you are poor and you can not afford an original iPhone, but you desperately want the IPHONE, you should be considering jailbreaking an imported/smuggled phone. I would first explain some key terms in the world of hacking an iphone.
Jailbreaking : It is any process which allows users to make changes to the iOS (iphone operating system). Installing unsupported apps and unlocking it are some of the things you can do. There are some standard software tools for achieving this. iPhone Dev team and Geohot were the first few people to have achieved this. The standard softwares developed by them like pwnage tool, quickpwn, Redmond pie can easily help any user jailbreak their iphone. They are available for free download on the internet from their websites :
Most of them are based on hacking the bootrom of the phone while some of them are userland based hack. Recently, jailbreaking has also been made legal by the US government.
Unlocking : Generally the iphones are sold tied with a particular service provider and work with that SIM only, say AT&T. The process of tweaking its software/hardware to make it accept any SIM card is called unlocking or more appropriately carrier unlocking.
Activation : When you buy a new iphone or install a fresh OS on the phone, if the OS is not the jailbroken activated OS, you will need to activate the phone on first usage. Without this you will not be able to acces any application on phone except emergency calls. During activation process, you insert the SIM when the phone boots up and connect it to itunes and the device activates on its own. Now you can access all applications. More about these can be found at :
Untethered jailbreak : This implies that the phone has jailbreak code on it and does not require connection to PC during booting. On the other hand, a tethered jailbroken phone always requires connection to computer running some specific software to regain its jailbroken state.
Although ample resources can be found on the internet about these, I wish to give a broad overview of the scene. If your phone is jailbroken, it has an app called cydia which can get you some really cool apps/resources. Ultrasnow is one such thing which lets you unlock your phone for any carrier. If you install appsync, it allows your phone to install even paid cracked apps which can be downloaded from sites like apptrackr.org.
Often during jailbroking, you would be asked to enter Recovery mode or DFU mode. The two are two different things. The screenshot below shows the phone screen in Recovery mode. In DFU mode, the phone screen is completely black.
The following screen shot shows a phone awaiting activation using its original SIM. Either jailbreaking or using Phonebook SIM can help activate the phone apart from using the legal original SIM which came with the phone.
Some great tips for iphone users from Saket :
- If you wish to format your computer you use for syncing your iphone, dont forget to deauthenticate the itunes account since the same account can be used on only 5 computers and formatting = a new computer.
- Use teamviewer to connect to any computer on any platform from anywhere in the world
- Use dropbox to access your important files from anywhere in the world on your phone
- Use iStorage or Mbdrive to use your phone as a pendrive or a wireless pendrive
- Use Evernote to convert pdf/images to text files and also sync them across your computers
Some useful tips from me :
- If you are on ios 4.2, you can track your phone anytime from any browser. If yours is not iphone 4 just verify your itunes account once on any iphone 4 then same account will also work for 3gs and 3g.
- Using Google Latitude, you can even track your friend's phones
- If your phone is locked to a carrier, and you using unlocking tools to use with other service, always carry the original SIM and sim tool to rescue your phone.
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