Previously, when I was asking around trying to unlock my cell phone, I realized that I should probably word it better when I say that. There is a difference between unlocking iPhones, and jail breaking them.  They are two completely different hacks, that give you control over your iPhone in completely different ways. Unlocking, the more popular of these two terms, is the trickery that enables you to buy your iPhone from AT&T, and hack into its protective features that keep other networks, like T-Mobiles out.  Jail breaking is a hack that will let you use third-party apps on your iPhone, ones Apple doesn't approve of. And this is something you’ll learn to do, as one of the steps moving toward learning to unlock your iPhone.

Now the iPhone 3GS has been impregnable until was recently. Usually, it's a group of self-styled experts that does all the pathbreaking unlocking and jail breaking on the iPhone - called the Apple Dev Team. With the iPhone 3GS however, a motivated dude named George Hotz beat the Dev Team to the line - with purplesn0w, the latest unlocking tool I found to unlock my cell phone with. The most impressive quality purplesn0w has to recommend it though is that it does its deed with the minimum carnage possible. It only alters three of the iPhone's original files to get the job done.

I discovered exactly how to unlock my cell phone, well, my iPhone 3GS anyway, in just a couple of steps. Let's assume that you have the jailbreaking process remote (using the purplera1n jailbreaking code), and just concentrate on the unlocking process at this time. Prior to starting with the actual unlocking, be sure you backup iPhone's contents, because you can never really tell what happens with these risky procedures. If things go awry, we'll need to reset your phone, an action that would certainly return your phone to the way it was from the box - no content or numbers at all.

Make certain that your iPhone is properly activated on your real provider first. And then, on the iPhone, you open Settings, then General and finally Network.  When you jailbreak your phone with the right software (with purplera1n), it installs on your phone, a strange sounding piece of content called Cydia. You'll need to use it now. Turn it on, pick the Manage setting. Follow the route Sources - Edit - Add, and then key in a string of nonsense called apt.geohot.purplesn0w. You follow up that beauty with a tap on the Add Source button and the Done button, and, you're done. I thought that I was a-ok with this, but I discovered that to unlock my cell phone required one more step and a reboot.

That's kind of an crucial step - installing Purplesn0w. You will need to search for the package com.geohot.purplesn0w on Cydia on your phone, then install it. Once you're done, you reboot, and there you go. This is one way I've figured out to unlock my cell phone . Hopefully, this will do the job too, for a good long time.