Upgraded My 1st Gen. iPhone to 2.1

Pwnage ToolEven though I am not in Hong Kong and on vacation in Beijing I am blogging and keeping an eye on the iPhone hacking community.

In the past 14 months I had unlocked/restored my iPhone over 30+ times, and documented my experience and findings with fellow readers. Much of these repeated unlocking and restoring was because I was testing various “unauthorized” 3rd party applications (“hacks”) for the iPhone, and some of them were not as stable as they should be. Even with authorized 3rd party applications my iPhone was sluggish and crashes when I run some of the applications.

When Apple claims that the iPhone firmware 2.1, released on September 12th, will correct much of the problems I’ve been encountering, I was again excited for the possibilities of returning my iPhone (1st generation) to its efficient spiffy 1.x state. Unfortunately, since my iPhone is unlocked and jailbroken I had to wait for the iPhone Dev team to upgrade their hacking tool, Pwnage Tool.

The iPhone Dev Team released their new version of Pwnage Tool 2.1 (Bittorent download) on Sunday (September 14), but I did not have time; rightfully, to check it out. I was planning to visit the Forbidden City this morning, but it is raining heavily in Beijing, so I decided to upgrade my iPhone (1st generation) instead.

I had wanted to hold myself back for 24 hours to give iPhone web sites: ModMyiFone, Hack the iPhone, MacGeekBlog, etc. time to refine the procedures and all the possible things that may go wrong during the process.

Now I am happy to say that I have now successfully unlocked my iPhone running firmware 2.1. The process went without a hitch.

I did not have to do anything to my already unlocked iPhone running firmware 2.0.2. All I did to prepare myself for the unlocking was the following:

  1. Upgrade my iTunes to 8.0
  2. Download the firmware 2.1 (5F136) (for 1st generation iPhone), placing this firmware (IPSW file) in ~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates/ folder on your Mac.
  3. If you had not already done so, you will need to download the 3.9 and 4.6 bootloaders. onto your computer.

The rest is simple. You can choose the well written tutorials from Hack the iPhone.

Enjoy and do share you experience with rest of the readers here. Particularly iPhone users from Hong Kong.

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