The iPhone Dev Team have now released their latest unlock tool for the iPhone 3G, though a tiny bit later than what they promised! The tool as you will know called yellowsn0w, will work with the iPhone’s latest OS update, firmware version 2.2 and in fact it requires that your iPhone be updated to 2.2 to run at all. Yellowsn0w is at the moment still in beta, version 0.9.4 (version has been updating constantly today!), which means it seems yellowsn0w isn’t absolutely perfect and everyone should use with 100% caution.

At this point, we can see that plenty of commenters and others across the internet have reported problems getting their iPhone 3Gs properly unlocked, picking up their preferred carrier. If you’re willing to go ahead with this, you must first know that your iPhone 3G needs to be upgraded to firmware 2.2 using the latest Pwnage Tool and not directly via iTunes, this is so that your iPhone’s baseband remains at 02.28.00. Any baseband different from this value will not be accepted and thus won’t be compatible to run with yellowsn0w.

Here are a few more official details you might find useful before making your decision to try out yellowsn0w:

• There is a known issue with SIM cards that have STK (SIM Toolkit) application menus.  These menus are usually items such as “top up” “get credit” “lotto numbers” etc. These menu items confuse the application sometimes.  Removing and reinserting the SIM once after reboot (give it about 10 secs 60 seconds (with v0.9.1) after you see the slide to unlock widget) fixes this issue.  We’re working on a better fix.  Update: version 0.9.4 fixes this for many (but probably not all) users who previously had to wait a minute and then replug the sim.
• For those of you using SIM cards without STK menus, the application has some optional arguments that will make the unlock much faster for you.  So either experiment on your own (use “yellowsn0w -h” for usage) or wait for a customization writeup.
• After you install yellowsn0w via Cydia, you should return to the Cydia main menu then reboot your iPhone with the 3rd party SIM installed.  Wait for the slide to unlock screen, then wait 10 or 15 secs more.   If you don’t see your carrier name pop up, then remove your SIM, reinsert it, and wait 10 secs more.  This is the step we’ll be working on eliminating next.

Use the link below over at iPhone Dev for more instructions, all the links are available there. We would recommend also reading some comments before going ahead. Like iPhone Dev have said, yellowsn0w is absolutely still in beta, still undergoing lots of tests, there are so many sims worldwide, it’s not a surprise that there will be problems, but no doubt many more updates are to come daily. If it doesn’t work for you, don’t feel too disappointed, we feel quite confident that yellowsn0w has potential for much more improvements in the future!

[via Engadget, iPhone Dev, Geeky-Gadgets]