ZiPhone 2.2 on the Mac

Could I have gone straight to 1.1.3? Possibly, but being a cautious fellow, I did both. The firmware downloads comes straight from Apple。

Zibri's site has links to download his command-line utility, along with a GUI version for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard - but not earlier versions of the OS. I downloaded it and, having quit iTunes and its Helper application, ran it.

My iPhone's an older model, so I couldn't unlock it using ZiPhone, so I just selected the Activation and Jailbreak options. These allow me to use the handset essentially as an iPod and to download and run third-party apps. It did it's stuff and I had a usable iPhone in a few minutes.

Basically, if an iPhone came with 1.1.2 or 1.1.3, it can have ZiPhone activate, jailbreak and unlock it. If it came with 1.0.1, 1.0.2 or 1.1.1, you can only use ZiPhone to activate and jailbreak. You need to check your iPhone's serial number to see which of these two approaches is best - check out the tutorials linked to in this article for more details.

ZiPhone auto-installs the popular Installer app. From that, I selected and installed the BSD Subsystem option - a stack of Unix utilities - and the unlocking tool AnySIM 1.1.3. AnySIM takes a short time to run, which has to be done with the phone in Airplane mode, but when it was finished I had a working, unlocked iPhone connected - coincidentally, since I bought my iPhone in the US - to the O2 network.