iPhone 3G to be unlocked, dev team speaks about DFU problems

Want to unlock your iPhone 3G and place it on any GSM network? Your long wait may soon be over. The anticipated unlock, codenamed "yellowsn0w," should be available later this month -- they are projecting a New Year's Eve release. If you wish to unlock your iPhone, you will need an iPhone 3G with 2.11.07 baseband or earlier, and it will need to be jailbroken.

In theory, if you update your iPhone 3G to the 2.2 firmware release in iTunes, you will lose the ability to perform the unlock because iTunes will update the baseband version. If you plan to do the unlock, you will need to update your iPhone using Pwnage.

Yesterday we told you about DFU mode not working with Macs running the new OS X 10.5.6 update; today, the dev team gave us a little insight into why this might not work. Remember when the unibody MacBooks were released and there were problems with jailbreaking attempts? Well, this is basically the same problem, except it is more widespread. The dev team believes that this is an error on Apple's part, and has nothing to do with Apple attempting to shut down the hacking community. Until there is another update you can attempt to manually replace the affected kernel extensions with the 10.5.5 versions, but the dev team warns that you should "attempt at your own risk."

Thanks to William and others for the tip!

[via Engadget]