After months and months of waiting I am the proud owner of a brand new iPhone. As any of you, I was an absolute novice in all iPhone related matters. Words like jailbreak, cracking, hacking, bootloader, baseband were(and some still are) strangers to me. All I wanted was to be able to use my iPhone with my current carrier(not AT&T) and that I wanted to be able to upload music, videos and cool free games onto it.

Anyways, I got the trick pretty quickly so now I’m gonna teach you, step by step, everything from unpacking the iPhone to getting it running.

Today, first lesson: the 4-minutes jailbreak. I’m assuming you’re using an Apple Mac(as me), but the instructions remain similar for Windows PC’s as well. We’ll be using the software ziPhone version 2.5c.

  1. Unwrap the iPhone. Carefully. It’s already charged, so no surprise there. Start it by pressing the button on the top edge. Underneath it, you’ll find cables and the dock. Plug stuff in – the usb end goes into the computer(make sure that if it’s a laptop, it has enough power for the time to come), the other one into the dock, the iPhone sits into the dock.
  2. If you have iTunes installed(you should), it will automatically start and try to connect to Apple/AT&T to activate the phone. But if you’re outside the US you don’t want this, you want to unlock and jailbreak it. So go ahead and close iTunes.
  3. For iPhone firmware 1.1.4 or earlier download ziPhone 2.5(or later) from http://www.downloadziphone.org/; versions for Windows and Apple are available. Unzip and run the application.
  4. You’ll see a bunch of buttons with various options. In most cases you want to run the first one – Do it all!, then on Start Process. Remember, your iPhone must be connected. Keep your fingers crossed.
  5. the iPhone will be reset, so iTunes will start up automatically. Hurry and close it again, or else the breaking will fail(with unexpected consequences). Now all you have to do is wait and look patiently to the Matrix writing displayed on the iPhone’s screen. Don’t unplug the iPhone before ziPhone is finished.
  6. When ziPhone is done, it’ll restart the iPhone one last time and also display some success message.
  7. iTunes will start again, this time it should see the iPhone as unlocked and activated.
  8. Congrats, you’re done. One click unlock, that’s a dream only ziPhone can make true.

Take out the iPhone original SIM card. You’ll need a needle you’ll use to press on the top edge of the iPhone(there’s a pin-sized hole there, just press with a hard needle and the SIM will get out). Insert your SIM.

If still in the dark, take a peek at this video:

The SIM should be detected and you should be able to make calls. You won’t see any of your existing contacts for now, but we’ll cover this part in the next episode.