iPhone Baseband

Hoping for a blazing fast 4G LTE compatible iPhone 5 to hit shelves later this year? Don't hold your breath. Although competitors to Apple's iPhone are already coming out with LTE phones, analyst Sam Greenholtz from Telecom Pragmatics claims Apple will wait for the iPhone 6 use the technology.

A report in The Street explains that Greenholtz has communicated with sources who say the LTE iPhone 6 is already under development. June or July 2012 is Apple's target launch date, which also gives carriers including AT&T and Verizon more time to roll out their LTE networks to full capacity.

Italian hacker Zibri has published a code snippet on his blog that points to a Qualcomm-sourced baseband chip in the next generation iPhone. The code in question showed up in iTunes, and hints that Qualcomm will replace Infineon as the source for iPhone 5 baseband chips.

Of course, Qualcomm is the originator of CDMA technology, and this code may just be in place for the Verizon CDMA iPhone. Zibri believes this is not the case, and several other sources have made it clear that Apple may be making the move to Qualcomm basebands across its mobile product line.

The Dev-Team could be working on an unlock for iPhone users who have already updated to official firmware 3.1.3 and find themselves stuck with no unlock options at the moment. Sherif Hashim has discovered an exploit that could be used to unlock the current iPhone baseband so the iPhone can be used with carriers other than AT&T.

This exploit was verified by Dev-Team's own MuscleNerd as a legitimate and working exploit. It's possible the Dev-Team would wait until the release of iPhone OS 4.0 on the next generation iPhone before revealing the exploit to Apple with a new unlock, however the new iPhone isn't expected to ship until later this summer.

George Hotz (Geohot) has released the newest update of his jailbreaking tool blackra1n, version RC3. In addition, he has made public a true carrier unlock for the latest firmware iPhone OS 3.1.2 and baseband 05.11.07.

Geohot's blackra1n RC3 software jailbreaks any iPhone running 3.1 or later in seconds on both Mac and Windows platforms. A reboot is all that's needed.