The iPhone Dev-Team has been working hard to bring us jailbreak software for the iPhone and iPod Touch and their latest versions of Pwnage Tool and QuickPwn are on the verge of being released.  There are still a few bugs they are trying to work out before they release, but it should not take them that long.  In the meantime, they may release a version that still has a bug that disables the YouTube app on devices that are not legally activated with AT&T, seeing that it will only affect iPhones that are unlocked.

Update 1 (Wednesday morning):

• Only ultrasn0w is going to take til Friday to get pushed out.  All of our other tools should be out pretty soon after the official Apple release.
• If you apply our jailbreak when it comes out, you can install ultrasn0w anytime after that.  You obviously won’t have cell service in the meantime, though.
• This may in fact be directly applicable to the iPhone 3GS if it can be jailbroken, because it runs the same baseband version.  Whether or not it can be jailbroken is a big question right now!
• If you’re on Twitter, please give @Oranav a pat on the back.  He could have revealed the crash he found to Apple and maybe gotten quite an incentive in return. Instead, he told us about it so that we could work it into an injection vector for the soft unlock.

Update 2 (Thursday morning):

• We have two issues that we’ve been trying to resolve:

1. There are new 3.0 complications with YouTube.app if you’re on a hacktivated (unofficially activated) device
2. There’s a bug in Apple’s new version of asr that our custom IPSW’s are tickling and causing crashes on, on some devices.  (For the nerdy or curious among us, the details of that bug were tweeted by planetbeing a month ago.)

• As of Thursday morning we now have a workaround for #2.  For #1, we’ll try our best to get it fixed but we may end up releasing a preliminary jailbreak in which YouTube doesn’t work for hacktivated devices, and then follow that up with a more complete jailbreak when we can.

iPhone Dev-Team

The iPhone Dev Team has released, on their blog, that they have successfully ported their Yellowsnow carrier unlock to work with the upcoming Apple release of iPhone OS 3.0. The Yellowsnow unlock was developed for the 3G iPhone when OS 2.0 was released. Many users were hoping for this because if you had been using an iPhone 3G on a carrier, other then AT&T, you would not be able to take advantage of the new functionality in the much anticipated 3.0 update, without losing their call function. No worries now apparently; the Dev Team says they will showcase their official/unofficial Yellowsnow Ultrasnow unlock today via a live feed. A member of the Dev Team, MuscleNerd, will twitter the live feed link later this afternoon. If you want to see this first hand make sure you follow @MuscleNerd on Twitter.

I have been locked to AT&T since the release of the OG iPhone and have had no need to use the Yellowsnow unlock, but apparently many have. I have never seen the reason for unlocking the iPhone when AT&T forces your to sign a 2 year contract. Unlocking the iPhone only makes sense if you purchase your iPhone from the plethora sold on Ebay and Craigslist, which apparently a great number of you do.

The Dev Team has also eluded that they are ready to work on an unlock solution for the soon to be released iPhone 3GS. They don’t want you to ask them about it. If they told you, they would have to kill you.

P.S. For the new iPhone 3GS, please don’t expect periodic updates about any progress we have or don’t have. Nothing gives Apple the upper hand like someone tweeting or blogging partial hack results. That’s not how cat & mouse is played That’s how the cat gets fed.

UPDATE:  The Dev team have changed the name of the unlock to Ultrasnow.  Pointing out that the new soft unlock with work with all basebands as long as you are on FW 3.0

iPhone Dev-Team