It’s been a busy week in the iOS hacker community, kicking off Sunday with the release of the JailbreakMe.com release and now culminating in the official iPhone 4 carrier unlock released overnight. The official Dev-Team Blog is reporting that ultrasn0w 1.0-1 has been officially released, which brings an iPhone 4 carrier unlock to the small patch’s utility belt of tricks which already includes the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. That means that iPhone 4 users who choose to run JailbreakMe.com now have an option to escape the shackles of AT&T, although here in the U.S. that only leaves us with T-Mobile -- and no 3G service, because the handset doesn’t support the 1700 band radio required to use it (slower EDGE service works fine, however).
The required baseband for the new ultrasn0w is 01.59 on the iPhone 4, which is the only one that currently exists for iOS 4.0 and 4.0.1. On the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, your baseband can be as old as 04.26.08 and all the way up to the most recent 05.13.04.
ultrasn0w 1.0-1 is, as always, a free patch downloaded via Cydia, which is installed with JailbreakMe.com. If you have an older version of Cydia installed and can’t find ultrasn0w when you search, make sure you add the repo: repo666.ultrasn0w.com (and yes, that’s a zero and not an “O”). Check out the embedded YouTube video below for all the details.
Meanwhile, Cydia developer Saurik (aka Jay Freeman) tweeted the good news Wednesday morning that he has updated his MobileSubstrate framework (which is used by ultrasn0w and other jailbreak apps) and Skype now properly works in the background on a jailbroken device, just as it should (we told you about that problem back on July 22).
“With @comex's jailbreak out and behind us, I'm back on fixing duty: new MobileSubstrate fixes Skype redux and Cyntact is in high resolution,” Saurik wrote via Twitter. If you’ve been plagued by no Skype backgrounding, head over to Cydia’s Changes tab and install those updates and you should be good to go.
Between an all-device jailbreak, FaceTime over 3G thanks to a My3G update, an iPhone 4 unlock and now Skype multitasking fixed, it’s certainly an exciting time to be a jailbreak user. Anyone wanna guess how soon Apple will spoil the party with an iOS update that kills it all?
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