LinOSX TechnoMash

According to Ars Technica, Vodafone will be launching the iPhone in India beating out Airtel. It’s not a surprise considering Vodafone already has deals with Apple in Europe. What remains to be seen is when will the iPhone be released, how much the iPhone will cost and whether it will be the rumored 3G iPhone.

There was a huge backlash against Mercedes Benz in the late 90’s for introducing old model E class cars in India as compared to the rest of the world. It took Mercedes some time but they realized that Indians want the latest of whatever the rest of the world is getting. That was a dozen years ago. With the amount of wealth recently created in India, a 3G Apple iPhone introduction in India will go a long way to placate people’s egos, knowing they have the latest and greatest.

Just last week, George Hotz or “geohot” as he is known did some amazing work on unlocking the iPhone for OTB 1.1.2 and 1.1.3 iPhones as well as unlocking upgraded iPhones. Since I’m using my iPhone on Vodafone in India, I didn’t want to upgrade from 1.1.1 to 1.1.2 as the unlock for 1.1.2 wasn’t an “official” dev release. But now, as the developer community has managed to unlock the iPhone under 1.1.3, it seemed like the right time to upgrade - though with a little bit of pain.

There are plenty of sites that explain how to upgrade a 1.0.2 or 1.1.1 iPhone to 1.1.3 and unlock it. I won’t go into writing a full post on how to do it. What I will do, however, is explain some of the “gotchas” during the upgrade process. Your mileage may vary depending on the method you use to upgrade. I primarily used the instructions at How to jailbreak 1.1.2 or 1.1.3.

I started with an unlocked 1.1.1 iPhone that was upgraded from a 1.0.2 iPhone. I had revirginzed the 1.0.2 phone and upgraded to 1.1.1 and unlocked using anySIM 1.1.1.

The first thing I did was to sync my iPhone to my MacMini and then do a complete restore my 1.1.1 iPhone to 1.1.1, thus wiping out all the garbage that I had accumulated in the last few months. Now, once the phone was restored, the unlock was still active but I had to jailbreak the phone as described in the instructions above.

After jailbreaking the iPhone, I installed the OktoPrep package from Installer.app. I then started downloading the 1.1.2 jailbreaking archive. Now it is critical that you do an UPGRADE from iTunes to 1.1.2 as described on Unlock.no. If you do a restore by mistake, you will have to restore back to 1.1.1, jailbreak it, install OktoPrep again, then, finally, UPGRADE to 1.1.2. Following the directions, made it very easy to jailbreak and use my 1.1.2 iPhone. I unlocked it using anySim 1.1.2u and the installed iWorld from the “Tweaks 1.1.2″ section of Installer.app.

Now, upgrading to 1.1.3 using the instructions at Unlock.no were great, BUT, I found that doing a Restore didn’t allow my iPhone to reboot no matter what I tried. Hence, make sure when you’re running the “Official 1.1.3 Upgrader” that you tap “Upgrade” and not “Restore”. If you follow those directions an repeatedly “Update” from 1.1.1 to 1.1.2 and then 1.1.2 to 1.1.3, you should be able to start your iPhone running 1.1.3 already unlocked.

Since upgrading to 1.1.3, an easier 1.1.3 unlock has also been made available but I have not tried it.

It took some time to get the correct MMS settings for the iPhone but below is a screenshot of the exact settings to be used with Vodafone in Delhi when using SwirlyMMS for the iPhone. The same settings should work with Vodafone users in the rest of India and I would love to hear from those of you who have gotten it working. Unfortunately, SwirlyMMS doesn’t yet allow receiving MMS messages but the developers are working on adding that feature in soon.

I’m back in New Delhi and brought my iPhone along for the ride. I popped in a Hutch (Vodafone) SIM card into the iPhone. Everything appeared to be working fine, except EDGE/GPRS. I looked around and couldn’t find any sites with Vodafone India settings for the iPhone. I did, however, find this page on the Vodafone India site that gave all the information necessary to get EDGE/GPRS up and running.

To get EDGE running on Hutch/Vodafone India on your iPhone, go to Settings then tap on General then tap on Network and then on EDGE. On the EDGE screen enter “WWW” under APN. Done. Simple, huh?

The SIM Applications (Settings -> Phone) on my Hutch SIM card seem to partially work but I cannot check my bill from the iPhone. I believe reading that Apple doesn’t recognize any phone numbers or applications on SIM cards. However, I think SIM applications are partially recognized. If anyone has any other experiences, I’d love to hear about them.

Finally, don’t bother running any Carrier Services from Settings -> Phone as they appear to be hardcoded for AT&T.

Anyone else running an iPhone in India on Hutch/Vodafone, Airtel, IDEA, or other networks, I’d love to hear your experiences.