How To Activate Your iPhone Without Official iPhone Carrier SIM

How To Activate Your iPhone Without Official iPhone Carrier SIM

Sherif Hasim has figured out an easy way to activate iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G without needing the official iPhone carrier SIM.

Please note it doesn’t unlock your iPhone but it activates it. But it helps you to hactivate your iPhone without the need to hack your iPhone.

Sherif had also discovered an exploit in the baseband (05.12.01) that was bundled with iPhone OS 3.1.3 earlier in the year.

Activating your iPhone means giving it access to the Home screen by telling your iPhone that you are using one of the iPhone's official carriers. Activating your iPhone is done through iTunes in order to use it with an official iPhone carrier.

Hactivation is the process of activating your iPhone without using an official iPhone carrier SIM. Until now, you needed jailbreaking tools like PwnageTool to hactivate your iPhone. With Hasim’s method, you can hactivate your iPhone using phone book sim card, without actually going through the pains of hacking it.

Sherif Hasim has also posted a video to show you how it activate your iPhone without the official iPhone carrier SIM:

Sherif has provided some useful information about the phone book sim cards:

Use any phonebook sim card, they are there in radioshak, mobile phone shops or any mobile tech moles , any phone book simcard will do the trick, no need for programmable sims, all those phonebook sims used to save ur contacts and transfer them have a universal ICCIDs preprogrammed so they all work.

To all those asking, I use this one Phone book Test card from DITS - Cdma Gsm Forum Mygsmindia. Yet, I used three other types and all work the same.

Please note that the phonebook sim cards will work as is in iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G but you’ll need to convert it into a micro-SIM in case of iPhone 4.

So with this activation solution, iPhone users will be able to use this method to activate (or hacktivate) their iPhone and use tools like Spirit or Redsn0w to jailbreak (which can’t be used for hactivation) their iPhone and then use Ultrasn0w to unlock their iPhone.

As always, please let us know how it goes.

iBooks 1.1.1 Adds Support For Audio And Video Content To eBooks

Apple has just released a new version of iBooks (v1.1.1), Apple’s App Store for books.

The latest version of iBooks adds support for audio and video content to ebooks.

Amazon had recently released an updated version of Kindle iOS app, a competing app that also added audio and video support.

Here are some of the new features and changes in iBooks 1.1.1:

• Double-tap an image within a book to view it in greater detail.

• Experience books that include audio and video.

• Enjoy substantial performance improvements when reading PDFs.

• Look-up definitions to English words inside books without a specified language.

• Addresses an issue that may have caused some book downloads to not complete.

• Includes many stability and performance improvements

In case you haven’t downloaded iBooks, you can download it from the App Store for free using this iTunes link.

As we have reported earlier, the roll-out of multimedia support to ebooks is significant for publishers. Early this year, Penguin Books' CEO John Makinson had revealed his plans to use the enhanced interactivity of the iPad to bring audio, video and live-chatting functionalities to ebooks. Makinson had noted that such features would not only improve reader engagement, but will also help the company monetize its digital content better.

A recent readability study had found that users took marginally longer time to read ebooks on the iPad than printed books but offered the highest reader satisfaction. However, few industry observers are skeptical over the potential of such an offering. They have argued that such functionalities could ruin the traditional book reading experience. Do you think multimedia based ebooks will change the book reading experience for the better?

Do you prefer Kindle’s app or iBooks? Let us know in the comments.

Apple Has Started 'Soft' SHSH Blob Checks With iOS 4

iPhone Dev Team has just reported that with iOS 4 or higher, Apple has started putting ‘soft’ SHSH blob checks in the firmware.

This means that like iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS, if iTunes can’t get the SHSH blobs for iPhone 3G or iPod Touch 2nd generation (due to signing window being closed), the iTunes restore will error out.

According to Dev Team, soft SHSH blob check can be easily bypassed by using Redsn0w and PwnageTool.

Cydia has also started saving the SHSH blobs for iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2G.

Dev Team reports:

Those of you with jailbroken iPhone3G and ipt2G devices may now have noticed Cydia starting to save your SHSH blobs too, just like it does for iPhone3GS, ipt3G and later devices. That’s because starting with 4.0, Apple started putting a “soft” SHSH blob check in the firmware. The SHSH blob check is very real in the sense that if iTunes can’t get your blobs (because the Apple signing window has closed), the iTunes restore will error out. But it’s “soft” in the sense that those devices can always use redsn0w or PwnageTool to get past the error (the bootroms themselves for those devices don’t require blobs to be in the firmware files, unlike the newer bootroms).

So, Cydia is doing this to allow you to continue to use iTunes to restore to 4.x on iPhone3G and ipt2g outside of Apple’s signing window without needing to use redsn0w or PwnageTool to get around Apple’s annoying new restriction.

So if you were wondering why Cydia has started storing SHSH blobs for your iPhone 3G or iPod Touch 2G, this should answer the question.