The iPhone dev-team has released Ultrasn0w to SIM unlock the iPhone 3G running the 3.0 firmware. It’s available via Cydia, which installs when you use the recently released PwnageTool to unlock the 3.0 firmware. There doesn’t seem to be any caveats besides advising T-Mobile US users to turn off 3G before install.

To appease people waiting for the iPhone 3G unlock, iphone-dev team member [MuscleNerd] did a live video demo this afternoon. The video shows him removing the AT&T SIM and putting in a T-Mobile SIM. After the switch, the phone shows no connectivity. He then runs “yellosn0w” in an SSH session with the phone. The phone then unlocks without needing to be rebooted and the signal bars appear. The final test shows the phone receiving a call.

The target for this release is New Year’s Eve and it doesn’t support the most recent baseband. Well be attending the 25C3 talk hosted by [MuscleNerd] and other team members. The VNC screen you see in the video is thanks to [saurik]‘s Veency.

Working as quick as ever, the iphone-dev team have updated the PwnageTool and QuickPwn to work with the new iPhone 2.2 firmware update. The trouble with the new firmware is that it updates the baseband of the phone, which could potentially undo any progress made towards an iPhone 3G unlock in the future. If you don’t care about that, you can use QuickPwn to jailbreak your phone after the upgrade, so you can run any app you want. If a future unlock is important to you, use the PwnageTool to strip the baseband update out of the firmware update.

[photo: edans]

The iphone-dev team has officially stated “all that remains is implementation“. They’ve developed all the pieces they need to perform a software unlock for the iPhone 3G, now it’s just a matter of putting them together in user friendly fashion. They’ve managed to run unsigned code on the baseband, developed custom AT tools, and are now showing injection of a background task. They will combine all of these techniques to override the carrier lock baseband code. As usual, they warn against performing any official firmware updates to the phone.