PwnageTool Simplifies Unlocking Your iPhone
April 3rd, 2008
Unlocking and jailbreaking iPhones has been common practice for a while now, in fact earlier this week, Apple Insider revealed that an extensive study released by Rubicon Consulting reveals that nearly one half of US iPhone users have taken measures to add applications to the handset on their own, while just a bit more than 10 percent say they’ve unlocked the device from AT&T’s wireless network. This doesn’t even include the thousands of iPhones being parallel imported into countries where the iPhone has yet to be officially released. Russia is one of the leaders in this regard according to Bloomberg, who just published a report stating that around 250,000 people own iPhones, more than any other country except the US and China.
This process is about to get easier with the release of the PwnageTool application from the iPhone Dev Team. To begin with it will only be available for Mac OS X, but a port to Windows is well underway. The application allows users to modify their iPhone’s bootloader to allow it to boot off any firmware. Without modification, the iPhone bootloader prevents the phone from booting unauthorized firmware. This software allows you to create alternative firmware and transfer it via iTunes just as if you were restoring official firmware (for example you could use firmware that has already been unlocked). Of course, there is always a chance you might brick your phone with this sort of software, so proceed at your own risk.
For those interested, more information can be found here and a video demonstrating the software in action can be viewed here.
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