3GWeek - Asia’s Mobile News

It is clear that Asian people is more creative than Westerns in the ability of unlocking any kind of phone, including iPhone 3G. Most technician in US isn’t good enough in unlocking iPhone 3G-unlike its previous non 3G version-especially when Apple is updating the firmware to 2.2. It claimed iPhone as impossible to be cracked.

Not in Hanoi of course. In the capital city of Vietnam, there live a man name Tuan Anh Do, a 29 years old tech lover, who already had have five shops, offers unlocking iPhone and iPhone 3G. Here is the step-by-step rule on how unlocking the phone:

First, a technician opened up the phone and stripped it to the motherboard. In his skillful hands, the device seemed much easier to dismantle than I expected.

The technician then extracted the baseband chip, the component that controls the connection between the phone and the mobile network, from the motherboard. (This is a painstaking task as the chip is strongly glued to the phone’s motherboard. A mistake during this process could brick the phone completely).

Once the chip was extracted, it was Tuan Anh’s turn. He used a chip reader to read information into a file. He then used a Hex editor to remove the locking data from the file, and after that, the chip got reprogrammed with the newly altered file. Now it was no longer programmed to work with only a specific provider.

The chip then got reassembled into the motherboard, another painstaking process.

As a last step, the technician put the phone back together, and it looked like nothing had been done to it.

To prove that the phone is really able to be unlocked, he showed us the snapshot where iPhone is running smoothly using Vietnam network operator. He guarantees that if any iPhone cracked is broken, he will replace it with brand new product. So far, he hasn’t experienced any broken phone, although he has broken 2 other iPhone last year for perfecting his skill.

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