Hi everyone. I am planning to buy an iPhone 3GS in the next couple of days. I live in Bolivia (south america). I talked to an employee and he told me that I could buy an iPhone without the contract by paying the full price ($599) but I need to have an AT&T account. Now, in the States I have T-Mobile.. But I have a couple of friends whose carrier is AT&T that could help me. By going to the Apple store and with his account (and permission) could I buy an iPhone 3GS? Would it come unlocked so I can call with it? If not, what procedures do you suggest to jailbreak and unlock it with minimal risk? PwnageTool and ultrasn0w? blackra1n? Does the baseband come "pre-upgraded" to the new one that comes with 3.1.2? How should I do this? Thanks in advance.

Originally Posted by Reznicek

Hi everyone. I am planning to buy an iPhone 3GS in the next couple of days. I live in Bolivia (south america). I talked to an employee and he told me that I could buy an iPhone without the contract by paying the full price ($599) but I need to have an AT&T account. Now, in the States I have T-Mobile.. But I have a couple of friends whose carrier is AT&T that could help me. By going to the Apple store and with his account (and permission) could I buy an iPhone 3GS? Would it come unlocked so I can call with it? If not, what procedures do you suggest to jailbreak and unlock it with minimal risk? PwnageTool and ultrasn0w? blackra1n? Does the baseband come "pre-upgraded" to the new one that comes with 3.1.2? How should I do this? Thanks in advance.

There are plenty of threads about this already.

best advice... forget the US and buy a factory unlocked phone from Australia/Asia.

AT&T no longer offer an outright iPhone purchase, your information is out of date regarding that.

To buy an iPhone from AT&T you have to go through a lot more hassle (including keeping the contract for 31 days then cancelling and paying lots of extra charges, activation cancellation etc that add up to somewhere around the $599) then you have to jailbreak and unlock. Right now the newest iPhone OS 3.1.3 (released yesterday) can't be jailbroken or unlocked. So you need to be act quickly to get a 3GS with OS 3.1.2 loaded on it from the factory.

Then you have the tethered jailbreak issue.

Do some research, you will find that the extra expense for a factory unlocked 3GS is worth it.