I recently decided to purchase the iPhone 3G. I really like it except for a few small problems and one BIG problem. The big problem is that it’s locked to AT&T’s network. I have horrible service on AT&T at home and at work. When I called them to cancel my service (on the 28th day after I bought my phone with the plan) they made it very difficult to cancel my plan. They said that I would have to call the Apple store where I bought the phone. I called the Apple store who told me that they can’t do anything about canceling my service and that I would have to call AT&T back. So I called them back. By the time I got someone on the phone I had spent probably about an hour waiting on hold between Apple and AT&T just to cancel my service. This time the AT&T representative looked up my area by zip code and told me that it was a “known issue” that service in my area was bad. They had plans to install a new tower but that would be like 6 months down the road. On top of that, there had been rumblings in the news about the iPhone dropping calls when the 3G network was bad. This supposedly was due to a faulty chip which Apple has attempted to fix via a firmware update (2.1). So I asked to speak to the manager. When I got her on the phone, she insisted that I hadn’t used my phone enough to know if it was bad service. Hello!? Half the time I don’t have service at work or at home. After explaining this to her she continued to make excuses. I asked for a discount on my first month’s bill. No dice. I wanted to keep the phone and cancel the service since I had already put all my personal information on the iPhone. Long story short, AT&T really upset me and handled the whole situation as if I was a nobody. They will never see another dime of my money. At least not until their CEO and their culture changes.
So I got my service canceled and got charged the $175 to do so. But at least I have the phone (which AT&T said would be no good without their service).
Today I decided to make the phone work with a much less expensive service provider. Here are some photos of how to install the the X-Sim into your iPhone 3G and begin using any GSM provider you wish.
Don’t do any of this until you have viewed all the photos and read the comments carefully.
Notice the pin hole next to the headphone jack. This is used to eject the sim card tray.
I used a mechanical pencil to eject the sim tray but you can use a paperclip, pin or anything else you can find laying around.
The sim card tray will only come out about as far as shown in the photo. From there you’ll need to grab it and pull it out.
You’ll see a message on the screen notifying you that the sim card is missing.
Pull the tray out.
The tray with my sim card in it. Notice that the card fits perfectly in the tray. Take notice of the notch in the upper left corner as well.
Pull the sim card out of the tray. Notice that there are at least 6 contact points on the back of the card. These points will need to make contact with the X-Sim.
Here’s what the X-Sim looked like in the container. I ordered it off of E-Bay for $20 shipped.
Looking closer at the X-Sim you can see that it is paper thin and has a small microchip in the upper left corner.
The X-Sim fits perfectly in the sim card tray.
We’ll need to cut some extra plastic off of our sim card to make room for the microchip on the X-Sim. I recommend that you lay your sim card on top of your X-Sim and measure this before actually cutting. You might even want to mark it with a pencil.
Sweet! Our sim card is ready to go.
The corner that we cut off is exactly the right size to make room for the microchip on the X-Sim.
Remember, there are six contact points on each card. They will line up when you lay the sim card on top of the X-Sim.
Here’s what they look like from the front when the are both in the sim card tray…
…and the back.
BEFORE YOU INSERT THE TRAY BACK INTO YOUR IPHONE be sure to tape or glue your old sim card into your sim card tray so that it doesn’t get stuck inside the phone next time you try to eject it.
Now you can insert the sim card tray back into your iPhone.
Sweetness! No more AT&T shackles! Works like a charm.
Finally the almighty 3G is unlocked!
So, do you know of a better way to do this? Have you had good or bad experiences with specific unlock cards? Add your comments below.
Nice finger nails and nice AT&T ads placement.
Nice post u have here 😀 Added to my RSS reader
Curious, why didn’t you use something like the Pwnagetool or something to unlock it? Rather than all the work with the simcard, you could have just ran the free software? Unlocked and jailbroke.
Am interested in finding out.
This is the iPhone 3G. the Pwnagetool doesn’t unlock the baseband yet. It will jailbreak but that’s it. The iPhone dev team is making progress on it though. From what I understand they are executing unsigned code with root level access.
Hopefully soon you won’t need an x-sim to unlock it.
Here we are almost 3 months past my date of cancellation with AT&T. I just got another bill. This one was for 32 MMS messages. The strange thing about this bill is that it was dated 11/02 – 12/01. I cancelled my service in September! The other strange thing is that I never sent a single MMS message even when I had the service.
This time I called and they were good enough to dismiss the charges but not before 30 minutes of me explaining the situation over and over. The magic words seemed to be, “I understand your billing policy. I need you to help correct this problem or escalate the call to someone who can.” after that they put me on hold for about a minute and dismissed the charges.
I also told them that if they couldn’t show me the exact dates of the MMS messages I would not pay it. The bill only shows a general billing period with no specific dates. We’ll see if they really dismissed the charge. I have a hunch that they reassigned the phone number and then got their wires crossed somehow. Whatever the case this doesn’t help my overall experience with AT&T.