Unlocking the iPhone

There have been a few stories in the news lately about how you can unlock the iPhone to work on something other than the AT&T network. As I’m fond of saying, it was just a matter of time. Now the stories. First up is 17-year George Hotz who spent 2 months with a soldering iron and some niche software to do the job.

A group called iPhoneSimFree claims to be the first to develop a software-based method to unlocking the iPhone.

Just yesterday, a subsidiary of Northern Ireland-based UniquePhones called iPhoneUnlocking.com put up a video of their software unlocking an iPhone. They would like to sell this software, but now it seems that they will be involved in a legal battle with AT&T.

Now whether any of these products/methods are technically legal is another question altogether. But the fact is that there are many people out there who want an iPhone or iPhone-like device without having to change carriers. So it’s either going to be that they get an unlocked iPhone or they buy one of the Chinese knockoffs. Time will tell.

via New York Times and Yahoo News.