Some time back, we told you the iPhone had been partially unlocked to allow outgoing calls with Australia’s Telstra; but now, thanks to the efforts of members in hackint0sh.org team, there’s now a way to get everything working — incoming, outgoing, SMS — with certain carriers in Europe. This method might also work in other areas.
The hack involves extracting communications information from the carrier’s SIM card as well as from the original AT&T card, using the information to update downloadable flash and EEPROM files, and finally writing them onto a new SilverCard to create what the hackers are calling a SuperSim.
The process requires access to a SIM reader/writer, a SilverCard, a non-AT&T carrier’s SIM (which has to be of the V1 type, to get a certain ‘Ki number’), an iPhone, some freely downloadable files and software, and a healthy appetite for risk-taking (hint: your other SIM could breath its last).
Important: In essence, this is making a copy–one that happens to work with the iPhone–of a network’s card, which, according to ozbimmer of the original Aussie hack, is “borderline illegal” in a lot of countries. Others members also posting in the original hackint0sh.org thread have warned about possible undesirable consequences, including, besides compromising the iPhone’s warranty and having one’s carrier subscription canceled, hefty penalties and even jail time (no jailbreak here). Rev2.org, therefore, provides this information for purely informational purposes.
The iPhone, with its Web 2.0 approach to serving applications, will officially be available in Europe and other areas late 2007/early 2008. If you can’t wait, though, and are willing to take the road less traveled (with huge warning signs nonetheless), you’ll want to keep an eye on the hackint0sh.org forums and the iPhone Dev Team IRC (#iphone at irc.osx86.hu).
