Over a week ago, it was costing about $100-150 to unlock iPhones here in Vietnam. With last week’s release of iUnlock, the prices have now dropped down to 400,000 VND ($25.00 US) with some people offering 200,000 VND ($12.00) to unlock iPhones in Saigon. Today, I unlocked my iPhone by myself for FREE 🙂

(My unlocked iPhone – Notice the Installer icon)

My first attempt to unlock the iPhone with Adam’s (Saigon Files) Macbook last night failed. I guess I am just too old school to appreciate a Mac so I gave up. This morning, I decided to make another try to unlock my iPhone with a PC (I just installed Sabayon Linux in my Thinkpad T60 and have not had time to install a virtual machine yet where I could have run Windows. Hence I could not use my own laptop to unlock my iPhone).

I borrowed a laptop, a trusty Thinkpad T60, from my friend, Phu, at Saigon Centre’s Highland Coffee. After trying to hassle with Vista, I was able to get iTunes to work but while downloading the latest firmware for my iPhone, the network server kept timing out. In short, the bandwidth at Highland’s was too slow today so I decided to wait and head to Indochina Capital which had higher bandwidth.

At Indochina Capital, I was given another Thinkpad T60 running Windows XP. I then started to read the iPhone unlock guide from this website:

http://iphone.unlock.no/

I followed the directions stated in the above guide and used iBrickr to access my iPhone. I had to read the guide several times before I got things right. After I hit the ‘Restore’ button in iTunes, I had to wait nearly one hour to download the upgrade for my iPhone (roughly 91 mbs!!!) Yeah, you really have to unplug your iPhone while iTunes downloads the file. At about 4 PM, iTunes finally gave me the error I was looking for thus allowing me to run iBrickr.

Finally at around 4:30 PM, I unlocked my iPhone and was able to use my Mobifone sim card saving myself $25 bucks 🙂

(My unlocked iPhone in front of my favorite Linux distribution, Sabayon)

Notice in the above picture the blue installer button with the downward arrow. For those of you who are paying to get your iPhones unlocked here in Saigon, this icon is most likely missing. No worries, the guys unlocking your phones probably removed it so they can make a couple more bucks installing the other iPhone applications for you. Just run iBrickr on your own and you can add that button again.

No need to pay someone to unlock your iPhones. Just ask me for help and I will show you how to do it for free 🙂