It was Asis2007 show where we won two iPhones in a lucky draw... As it was first opportunity for Yogesh to attend such large scale security exhibition, we were in Las Vegas alongwith Bhavesh.
In first two days of this exhibition, Anixter - a trading company wanted visitors to visit at least 18 of its partner booths to earn one coupon for the lucky draw and 24 to win two. It was to give 10 iPhones to the winners of this lucky draw on third day of exhibition and guess what??? We won TWO of these 10!!! We were the only Indians in the show and it was fun watching other people when we won the second phone... Next day when I was at one of the stall, the guy at the stall greeted me like "Oh, welcome! You are the lucky one who won iPhones yesterday!"
Well, winning an iPhone was good but the pain it invited was much more then these freebies... iPhone in US comes locked and thus you just cant insert any of your SIMs and start using it. To use iPhone, you have to activate a new 2 year contract with AT&T... your existing AT&T plan also wont work with iPhone. And of course, no other service provider SIM will work in iPhone. Well, no one likes this but thats Apple! Now, to have two iPhones sitting idle brought us a challenge of finding a way to unlock them that we could use any SIM with it... and thats when the adventure began... That evening, from internet, we could find some ways to unlock at least iPod and camera of this phone...
Next day, we left for Grand Canyon in early morning. It was fun driving all the way from Las Vegas to Grand Canyon... (I want to write separately about this trip some day...). That night, though we had a five hours drive and four hours at Grand Canyon, we started working on to unlock this phone. Yogesh was very determined for it... It was 2am early morning when I fell asleep... When I woke up at 5am, Yogesh was ready with an unlocked iPhone!!! While I tried to override iPhone's internals software, Yogesh found out a site which provided some tools for easy unlocking of this phone... See! Sometimes, my techie background makes me suffer....
Anyway, so I thought unlocking iPhone saga was over and I never would need to burn my fingers for it again... but the saga was not over...
Yesterday, a friend brought another iPhone and asked me if I could unlock... Techie inside me suddenly rose above all my priorities and forced me to put aside all my work and start unlocking this iPhone...
As this phone was shipped with a very new firmware, no unlocking tools for this version were available online... There are few sites which claim to unlock this version but they dont guarantee... Found a site which listed how to unlock this version but it did not work... I was foreced to go my "techie" way then use any "readymade" solution... but in this process, I found some interesting tools like PUTTY and Jaiilbreaker...
Tweaking Apple OS was always fun when I used to work with Mac IIfx way back in 1989... Those days, MACs were mainly used for Desktop publishing work for magazines and newspapers as most of the scanners and image setters had MAC interface. Ours was the first MAC IIfx of India and there was no Apple office in India. At that time, Macs were shipped with Mac OS - Apple's own OS. Later, Mac started using OS X of IBM... With my little exposure and experience of OS X, it was fun finding more about this OS while trying to connect to iPhone... (I wish Windows was built as strong as OS X... )
I started working on it at 5pm yesterday... missed aarti at 7pm for this... missed my dinner at home with Shilpa and Akshar... continued working on it in office till 11pm... came home and had a quick dinner and resumed the "operation unlock"... 2am early morning, no sign of any success... had a cup of coffee and resumed with the fresh thoughts and concentrated efforts... no luck... at 5am, I had no more energy to continue and no more will power to ignore the back pain...
Woke up at 8:30am and after my morning rituals, resumed the "OU"... I continued this effort in office and nothing to avail till noon... the site I found earlier was not accessible from office... and I came back home to access it from my home connection... The site was accessible and the saga continued till 5pm... No matter what I tried and no matter how perfect my efforts were, just at the end, my SIM kept on getting rejected... I could ping the phone, I could write my files in the phone, I could even execute some codes inside the phone and I could actually change some of the bytes of its firmware, it just did not work with my SIM... All diagnosis worked fine, all debugging worked well... all checksums were correct but it just did not accept my SIM...
Before I gave up, I searched net again to find out if anyone had reported such problem... nope... no one did :(... Then I came across a site http://www.iphonesimfree.com/ which also claimed that it can unlock 1.1.2 firmware iPhone... Well, I thought "one more site!"... but then I noticed something inbetween on this site... It said "We would like to also bring your attention to the recent events surrounding the iPhone Scene around the world. The recent launch of the European iPhone has introduced a new Bootloader which "currently" does not allow any kind of unlocking. The same Bootloader is present on the new iPhones that are purchased in the US with 1.1.2 pre-installed. " OMG!!! I quickly checked the Bootloader on my phone and it IS the recent one :(((( This was the reason that despite proper hacking, my SIM was not accepted by this iPhone... I was disappointed that I did not think about suspecting the bootloader before... Apple is smart that it came out with a new version of bootloader so that the hackers could not exploit it like its earlier version... But as that site said, I dont know how long this bootloader will remain virgin...
Anyway, enough about this techie thingy. Time for some praise for iPhone though personally, I dont like the phone of iPhone.
1. Its touch system is amazing... I wonder Apple this time too will be a trendsetter for touch based user interfaces.
2. Its sound quality is as superb as of iPods... Its built-in speakers though dont sound that sweet and they are not very powerful.
3. YouTube on the phone! Nothing great about it though but it tends me to think that YouTube is going to be another revolution in social world...
4. Amazing Camera... This camera's picture quality is much better then any other phone camera pictures I have seen. Nokia phone cameras suck all the time and I have seen people complaining the same for Motorola and other phones. iPhone camera produces real good quality pictures. Some of them are below.
Name of the store forced me to take the picture!
No need to explain! My favorite place in Toronto...
Look at the quality of the picture... Amazing!
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