(This bit didn’t really have much place in the last post, so I chopped it out and gave it its own home.)
Before I left Canada, I jailbroke my iPhone.
I know, naughty me. I’m not really down with the whole jailbreak thing, but I was pretty well forced into it. What it is, if you’re unfamiliar with the concept, is jailbreaking lets you do things Apple doesn’t want you to do. Usually it’s simple things like cosmetic changes or getting old Nintendo games on there. But I don’t care about any of that, I wanted to unlock my phone.
See, I’m in a contract with my carrier, who will not let me unlock my phone to use it on other networks. So I called Apple. They told me they couldn’t do it, and that I should ask my carrier. They tell me to ask Apple. It’s like when your parents are telling you “go ask your mother,” “go ask your father.” Except with Apple and my carrier you can’t just say “mom said it’s fine.”
I got nowhere with the corporations, so I had to go the shady route and jailbreak my phone. It’s not really that shady, I’m just not much of a warranty-breaking badass like that. But I did it anyhow. I went through all the steps, rebooted the phone, and it was fine. The jailbreak took. I did all my checks and, as far as I knew, I was well and unlocked.
So I went to a shop in Dublin. An Irish phone carrier called 3. I spoke with this one girl and explained what I needed. I told her I needed a pay-as-you-go plan with as close to unlimited data as I could get (GPS is incredibly important to me, as you can probably appreciate). What luck! I could get a plan that worked in Ireland and a large portion of the continent! It was €20 per month, which was more than relevant to my interests!
“I will purchase this SIM card,” I told her, “and I accept your terms and conditions in a most grateful manner!” Maybe not my exact words, but, well, I bought it. She asked me, multiple times, if I was sure the phone was jailbroken. “Oh sure. Did it myself.” She was impressed at this king of nerds before her and she questioned me no further. I shut off my phone, removed my Bell SIM, replaced it with the magical 3 SIM, turned the phone back on and…
Nothing. “No Service” blinked at me, unchanging. “You mad, bro?” it seemed to sneer at me.
I could sense the shop girl was becoming swiftly less and less enamoured of me and my presence (Irish girls, pff). I took a brief respite in the corner where the Nokias linger. I went online to seek a fix.
No fix was ever found, though. I’d borked everything and I’d bricked my phone. I’d essentially turned my iPhone 4 into a fat iPod Touch, and so it remained for the rest of the journey. Not until I updated it to iOS 6 did I have a functional phone.
The takeaway here is that my next iPhone will be a factory unlocked one, and I will also jailbreak again.
Unless there’s something really cool I can do. Then, maybe.