[iPhone] iPhone 3G Hardware unlocked in Vietnam

CNet.com reports Tuan Anh Do, a 29 years old business man from Hanoi, now offers hardware unlocking services for the iPhone 3G. He is owner of a couple of cell phone repair stores and he now managed to find a rather painless way to unlock the iPhone 3G and offer that as a service to customers. Unlocking costs about 80US$.

Tuan Anh Do is well known to the iPhone scene as TAmobile (Link here). He was also the first to extract the bootloader from the first generation iPhones.

Unfortunately unlocking requires desoldering, binary modifying and resoldering of the baseband chip and is therefore by far not fool proof. Painless unlocking here means “painless” for experiences solder technicians. For the rest of us we either plan a Vietnam holiday or wait for a store to offer that service around the corner. Anyway, find the whole story and some more really amazing pictures on Dong Ngo’s article on CNet.com.

Picture is courtesy of CNet.com

One thought on “[iPhone] iPhone 3G Hardware unlocked in Vietnam

  1. mr noone

    You cannot hardware unlock iphone 3g desoldering the baseband chip won’t do anyone any good apart from wrecking the chip or the board, as the baseband is glued down removinging it will kill the chip, the hardware unlock claimed to be $80 the baseband chip if you can get one may be $80+ what do these people make for doning the job, all they do is put the dame turbo sim inside the phone instead. so thats why you can use anysim, try and upgrade the firmware, you will see that your phone will be locked up again, hahaha vietnamese solutution…..

    I don’t think so. GeoHot desoldered the first gen’s baseband chip aswell and reprogged it… Those Vietnamese guys were also the first to desolder the chip of the 1st gen iPhones with bootloader 4.6 and read the firmware of it to have GeoHot disassemble it… You’d better read more often here :-) Anyway thanks for your opinion… mp

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