Drowned Nexus One

Last Thursday, I was caught out in a serious deluge of a storm and was thoroughly soaked to the skin. When I got home, I pulled my Nexus One out of my pocket and watched in horror as the screen flickered and died. I have the Nexus One in a bag of rice hoping it will dry out and revive but I can say this is one area where the iPhone design is better. My iPhone 3Gs was more water resistant. I was drenched in a similar way in a rain storm with my iPhone in my pocket and it survived without any water damage. I chalk this up to the don’t-open-me sealed design of the iPhone case vs the pop-open Nexus One with a removable battery. I do seem to manage to destroy phones at about the one-year mark with alarming predictability, though, regardless of manufacturer.

Time to get another phone and quickly. I’m willing to pay for an unlocked device rather than wasting my time futzing around rooting devices. That’s why I got the Nexus One in the first place. On the other hand, I’m really, really irritated that Gingerbread is still not out on the Nexus One. And the price at the Telefonika in the Accra Mall for a new Nexus One is roughly $900! At the current exchange rates, the price for a new unlocked iPhone in Ghana is nearly $1500! RIM BlackBerry phones carry a similar premium and are immensely popular here.

As I’m unwilling to pay $1500 for a phone if I can avoid it, I find myself having to pull my pre-Nexus One iPhone 3Gs out of a shipping crate so that I can get it working here in Ghana. My wife has an AT&T BlackBerry which AT&T unlocked without comment but AT&T will not unlock an iPhone for any reason. (FWIW, I am still an AT&T customer. My company pays for a full monthly data plan with international roaming but I normally use Airtel in Ghana.)

These are not reasonable prices in my world. I have an iPhone locked to AT&T and running iPhone OS 3.2. What I wanted was iOS 4.2.1 but I wasn’t going to shell out $1500 to get it. So, despite my desire to be a good little consumer and my willingness to pay something of a premium to get an unlocked phone, I found myself researching how to jailbreak my iPhone 3Gs. It took me some time that I’ll never get back but this is what I came up with:

1. I used Pwnage 4.1 to build a custom 4.2.1 iOS image without the baseband update from iOS 4.2.1. To do this you need the iOS image and you have to add a iPhone 3Gs 4.2.1 bundle to Pwnage. This is important because the baseband I had is unlockable using UltraSn0w but the baseband from iOS 4.2.1 is not and the solution to that problem is flashing a baseband firmware from the iPad which makes it impossible to go back to a stock iOS image.
2. I kept getting an error from iTunes when I tried to flash the firmware onto my phone. It turns out that I needed to have iTunes 10.1 and I had whatever comes with Snow Leopard because I don’t actually use iTunes. But after doing the update to the latest iTunes 10.1.x, it worked.
3. Then I used greenpois0n to jailbreak the phone because it seems to be the only jailbreak for iOS 4.2.1 that works without having to tether the phone to a computer for every reboot..This worked on the second try.
4. Basically, what I had at this point was a stock 4.2.1 image with an older baseband and an extra green icon called “Loader”. What Loader does is install Cydia on the root partition and it failed because the partition was too small. Back to step 1, this time I created an image with a 1024MB root partition.
5. Once the phone was jailbroken with Cydia on it, I was able to use Cydia to install UltraSn0w which unlocks the baseband for any SIM. Finally my phone was up and running on Airtel.

I’m not very happy about this state of affairs but there it is. I am happy to have a working phone again.