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Dong Ngo is an editor for Cnet who’s visiting his homeland of Vietnam. While there, he came across a phone shop that’s doing a booming business by unlocking 3G iPhones. But Tuan Anh Do isn’t doing it by replacing the SIM card (which can cause compatibility problems with iTunes) or with a software hack. He does it by cracking open the iPhone and rewriting a hex file. The cost? Around $80 for an hour’s work.

Cnet provides an extensive overview (with pictures) of the process:

First, a technician opened up the phone and stripped it to the motherboard. In his skillful hands, the device seemed much easier to dismantle than I expected.

The technician then extracted the baseband chip, the component that controls the connection between the phone and the mobile network, from the motherboard. (This is a painstaking task as the chip is strongly glued to the phone’s motherboard. A mistake during this process could brick the phone completely.)

Once the chip was extracted, it was Tuan Anh’s turn. He used a chip reader to read information into a file. He then used a Hex editor to remove the locking data from the file, and after that, the chip got reprogrammed with the newly altered file. Now it was no longer programmed to work with only a specific provider.

Keep in mind that if anything goes wrong in this process, the phone is bricked, and the shop will replace it (a costly mistake). But Tuan Anh claims to have never done it, except for two phones that bit the dust while figuring the process out.

Read on for more about the ultimate hacking of an iPhone: and how easy it is for Apple to undo it.

Via [Cnet]