In the face of the moments in which the connection between the iPhone and your computer sporadically drops and you fear that you have turned your expensive, shiny high-tech device into an expensive paperweight, what really counts is the final result. Our phone, bought in a regular Apple store in the US, cost €304/₤212. With a little patience and the tools described in this article, you can activate the iPhone without being bound to a tariff and can unlock it in about 3 hours.

Starting November 9, O2 will offer Apple’s trendy pocket-sized computer as part of an 18-month contract. In this bundle, the handset itself will cost ₤269, but you’ll also be paying 18 instalments of ₤35 in monthly charges for the cheapest tariff. Put together, that amounts to ₤899. The great demand for unlocked iPhones has also made its impression on the online auction portals, where such handsets have been spotted for as much as €1200.

As the programmer of the unlock tool, Erica Sadun of the Unofficial Apple Weblog is owed a great debt of thanks for enabling users to remove the SIM-lock from the iPhone with relative ease. Nonetheless, our iPhone Workshop serves primarily not as a guide to unlocking your iPhone, but to explore and to help us understand the technological background of the techniques involved. To avoid problems with a US iPhone, we explicitly do not encourage you to use the tools described here. If you choose to do so anyway, you are acting on your own responsibility.

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