Like Lindsay Lohan, the iPhone Cannot Stay out of the News

This past week, a 17-year-old from New Jersey did what most of you college students only dreamt of doing: He figured out a way to make the iPhone compatible with another service. Instead of complaining about having T-Mobile, which doesn't carry the iPhone, he set forth on a valiant quest to "unlock" Apple's impressive cell phone; "unlocking" is just a fancy term for "allowing the device to work with more than one provider." After ingesting cases of energy drinks and soldering some of the wires inside the device together, he became the first person to use the phone without AT&T.

You see, Apple made AT&T an exclusive agreement for the phone, but if you have a soldering iron, T-Mobile and tons of patience, you potentially have everything you need to unlock the iPhone for yourself. This, of course, is assuming that you can get your hands on the phone.

The reason that the phone is only compatible with T-Mobile is because this carrier operates on the same band frequencies as AT&T. Essentially, any cell phone provider using the GSM service would work, but there are only two in the United States: AT&T and T-Mobile. You can read more about the GSM on Wikipedia, and if you don’t like what it has to say, feel free to change it.

So now that you’ve cancelled your cell phone plan and switched to T-Mobile, you need to find a way to get an iPhone. In fact, maybe you should get two, just in case you accidently break one while soldering the phone's innards.

What? You can’t afford one? Me neither, but somehow the teenager with the miraculous unlocking powers managed to obtain more than one. According his blog, his first iPhone was donated. I’m not going to weed through all of his posts, but I’m assuming the rest of his iPhones were donated, too. Still, it pains me to read that “he purposely destroyed one iPhone to figure out how the pieces operated,” which comes from the San Francisco Chronicle. I guess you really do need to sacrifice one every once in a while for the good of the group; I know this argument has been used for cannibalism, but apparently it also applies to $500 cell phones.

Now, I’m not going to tell you how to unlock your (or anyone else’s) iPhone, since the legalities of this process is debatable, and I don’t want to be held responsible for your breach of contract. I’m sure you can find some other site out there with step-by-step instructions if you search long enough.

If, by some stroke of fate, you’ve managed to hit the lottery (or maybe got a refund check from your loan company), you can pay someone else to unlock your iPhone for you. Unique Phones and iPhone Sim Free both claim to have hacked the iPhone software and will unlock your phone for a fee. Of course, you must also have a lot of faith to use this method, since they may be scams. Too bad eBay pulled the New Jersey kid’s auction, since that would’ve been the easiest way to obtain an unlocked phone. The poor guy had to settle for trading the iPhone, which he didn’t pay for anyway, for a car and three more phones.

I guess if there’s any lesson to be learned by this, it’s that you don’t really need a college education, so long as you’re alright with being paid in cars and phones. It’s awesome that someone managed to open up the iPhone’s potential user-base, and the fact that it was done by a regular person makes it all the more spectacular. Unfortunately, I already have AT&T, so this whole hacking ordeal matters little to me personally; plus, I have little interest in getting an iPhone. Call me old fashioned, but I’m perfectly happy with my camera phone, two iPods and three computers, and thus have no interest in trying to combine the three.

If you have extra time on your hands and money that’s just itching to be spent, go ahead and try your best shot at modifying an iPhone: The only condition is that you must tell me about it, so I can include you in a future blog.