Tuan Anh Do shows off an unlocked iPhone 3G at one of his cell phone repair shops in Hanoi. (Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)

Tuan Anh aka TA_Mobile, Vietnamese cell shop owner and iPhone hacker, has maanged to unlock the iPhone 3G via a crazy hardware hack that involved removing the motherboard from the iPhone 3G, removing the BaseBand Chip (SGOLD) and re-flashing it and then re-fitting it to the motherboard.

TA_Mobile if you remember was the first to extract the 5.8 bootloader form the iPhone 3G via a hardware method, and has now once again proven his hardware skills. This unlocking method is really not for the faint of heart and probably no one but the TA_Mobile shops will be preforming this hack for sometime. It will set you back $80 USD, not much for most of us, but a small fortune for those in Vietnam.

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3G iPhone, Featured, Hardware Unlock (Sim Hacks), What's New baseband, hardware, iPhone, iphone 3g unlock, sgold, ta_mobile, Tuan Anh, unlock

TA_Mobile is a Vietnamese iPhone hacker and has been hard at work taking apart his new 16Gb white iPhone 3G and has managed extract bootloader 5.8 from the hardware. Although this itself is not a unlock, it does give dev’s like ta_mobile, the Dev Team, GeoHot and others one step closer to unlocking the iPhone 3G baseband.

The bootloader and baseband are critical to both software and hardware unlocks. Ta_Mobile hopes that the new Bootloader 5.8 can be used to create a soft unlock like that mentioned by the Dev Team on their Wiki:

Simple Unlock

“From the S-Gold’s perspective, here are the fundamentals of unlocking basebands. A simple byte sequence search combined with a neutered baseband are all you need. (The s5l8900 CPU imposes other restrictions beyond this discussion.)

• The secpack is at ICE*.fls offset 0×1a4 (0×800 bytes long)
• The baseband is at ICE*.fls offset 0×209a4
• The baseband length is at ICE*.fls offset 0×20 (subtract 0×20000)

Due to gray’s initial RCE of the baseband, and combined with a neutered bootloader, unlocking recent and future basebands has been reduced to a simple byte search. “

For now ta_mobile is only distributing the 5.8 bootloader files to developers looking to create a software unlock. With

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