Unlock, Jailbreak and Activate your iPhone

So your thinking of getting the iPhone but a bit put off by the £35 a month contract with O2. Well, its a lot easier to unlock and get around the contract activation then you may think. In this guide, i’ll be showing you just how simple it is.

Now the way you buy an iPhone is different to other contract phones as you do not actually sign up to any contract in the shop when you buy it. Instead, the store will tell you it is only available on contract but when you come to buy it, they will sell you the phone, hand you the handset and tell you that the iPhone will not work untill you plug it into iTunes and sign up to an O2 contract.

This is where things differ from their plans.

Firstly, download iTunes and install onto your PC. Run iTunes once installed and plug in your iPhone. iTunes will recognise your iPhone and show you a ‘Get Started’ page. This gives you the option to start the registration process which will activate your iPhone and sign you up to a monthly contract. If you want a monthly contract then follow the instructions on screen. If you want to unlock and activate your iPhone without signing up then just minimise the iTunes screen and proceed to the second step.

Now you need to visit Ziphone to download their free software. Once downloaded, unzip and run the program. From here you a presented with a few options. You can ‘Prepare for Upgrade’, ‘Jailbreak + Activate’, ‘Jailbreak’ or ‘Do it all’. What we want to do first of all is to upgrade to the latest firmware system for the iPhone (v1.1.4 as of this post) as many stores sell the iPhones with old firmware (many are sold with v1.1.3). So to start with, we click the ‘Prepare for upgrade’ option which will reboot your iPhone into Recovery Mode. Having done this, a message will pop up in iTunes telling you that you must restore your iPhone before it can be used. Click restore and iTunes will download the latest firmware from Apple and install this to your iPhone. This whole process can take around 15-20 mins depending on your download speed.

Once this is done, your iPhone will reboot and look exactly as it did when we first started but know we know that it is up-to-date and running the latest firmware available. Once iTunes recognises your iPhone again, minimise iTunes and proceed to click the ‘Do it all!’ button in ZiPhone. This will jailbreak your iPhone allowing you to run 3rd party applications on it. It will also unlock your iPhone allowing you to use it on any network and lastly it will also activate the phone.

This process will take around 10 mins to complete. Once completed your iPhone will restart and be fully recognised as activated by iTunes so will not longer prompt you to sign up. You will also be able to insert any sim card and use as originally intended.

Simple as that!