Unlocking the iPhone for pleasure and profit...

After months with my unlocked iPhone still running firmware 1.0.2, the arrival of Zibri's ZiPhone tool persuaded me to try an upgrade. I'm glad I did - I now have an unlocked 1.1.3 iPhone.

Why didn't I do so before? Cowardice, really. Having read how tricky upgrading became with subsequent firmware releases, I was worried about bricking my handset. And the gains from firmware 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 seemed too small to warrant the risk.

Version 1.1.3 persuaded me otherwise, but research revealed I'd have to put my phone back into its pre-unlock state - a process dubbed 'virginisation' by iPhone hackers - and the published procedures were long and tortuous, involving lots of FTP'ing and command-line tweaking. All this is necessary to repair the damage done to the original iPhone code by early unlocking routines - damage that prevents firmware updates from taking hold.

Again, the risk seemed to high.

And then I found The Virginizer, a utility put together by the guy who runs the Unlock.no website. You can find the details at the site, here. It involves a small download, which you can acquire by tweaking the Installer application's sources settings. Run The Virginizer and it'll repair your handset's baseband software but relock it and deactivate it, so it's right back at square one.

But it works, and with a virginised iPhone, I was able to use iTunes 7.6 running under Mac OS X 10.5.2 to restore the handset to firmware 1.1.1, which I'd downloaded already, as advised by Unlock.no. Connecting the iPhone to the computer then pressing down both the power and home keys puts it into Restore mode.

Option-clicking on iTunes' Restore button lets you manually select which firmware file to restore from. In Windows, you CTRL-click. I used 1.1.1, because that's what's mentioned in Unlock.no's instructions. However, having done the restore, I immediately used the same process to restore to a downloaded copy of the 1.1.3 firmware.