PhillC's Journal: Breaking out of Jail

Last night I spent a few hours attempting to "jailbreak" my iPhone. Essentially after a "jailbreak" the iPhone is in a mode that will allow the installation of native third party applications. The main problem is that all current jailbreak methods require the phone to be running Apple's firmware version 1.1.1. All new iPhones that have been sold since the beginning of November run firmware 1.1.2. Upgrading older phones through iTunes also sets them to firmware 1.1.2

So, the first step is to try downgrading existing firmware from 1.1.2 to 1.1.1. It's relatively easy enough and I won't go into all the details here. I was following the steps in the following, slightly confusing, tutorial on the Hacktint0sh forums:

http://hackint0sh.org/forum/showthread.php?t=18353

See that line right near the end that says, "This will not work with brand new out of the box iPhones that already come with firmware version 1.1.2"? Well I didn't read that first and set off down the road to firmware downgrade.

In actuality, I managed to successfully downgrade to 1.1.1, restored the phone using the Windows command line utility iPhuc, connected to the Net with WiFi, loaded the AppSnap installer and installed a few choice programs. Happy days it would seem! Not quite. My iPhone did not re-activate with O2. Essentially I now had a rather expensive Internet tablet device that only connects with WiFi. I'd lost the essential phone functionality and thus a great deal of the data connectivity with it.

I attempted to hard re-boot the iPhone, which was a step I needed to undertake after 24 hours when the phone was very first activated with O2, before service was received. However last night, this step simply put the phone back in restore mode. After going through the whole firmware installation process again, there was still no network activation.

Around 1am, I decided to restore the factory settings, which is a helpful option in iTunes. Sure enough, my phone was back on the O2 network pretty much immediately the firmware was back to the original 1.1.2. To be clear, that's not 1.1.2 upgraded from 1.1.1. I had to completely restore the base factory settings, which effectively wiped all my data on the iPhone, meaning email had to be re-configured, Safari bookmarks gone and all those helpful SMS conversation threads trashed. Fortunately syncing the phone with iTunes meant that contacts and music were easily recovered.

Just as the above tutorial states at the very end, it doesn't look like iPhones that came from the factory with firmware 1.1.2 can currently escape jail and retain their mobile network connectivity. I'll just keep waiting for a simple one-click 1.1.2 jailbreak that doesn't require firmware downgrades first.