Yesterday we got the good news that Comex will be releasing a Spirit like tool that will make it very easy to jailbreak iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS (old/new bootroom), iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2G, iPod Touch 3G on iOS 4.

We’ve some more good news for new iPhone 4 users. MuscleNerd of the iPhone Dev team has just confirmed that they’re making good progress in unlocking iPhone 4 baseband.

The ‘baseband’ is the generic nickname given to the internal components of the iPhone that handle the phone calls and Internet access. This ‘baseband’ is a tiny and unique independent computer system that runs inside your iPhone, it is separate to the main system that handles the applications (such as email and google maps) and it talks to the main part of the phone over an internal communications network.

Think of it like a cable modem or other peripheral that is attached to your home PC that needs occasional updates. When a software update is released and presented to you within iTunes the baseband is sometimes updated (to fix bugs or add new features).

When iPhone 4 was launched, folks at ModMyI had reported that:

The DevTeam and others have been checking through the iPhone 4, and have noticed the baseband runs a completely different OS than on previous models. The iPhone 3G and 3G[S] both ran Nucleus OS on the PMB8878 baseband CPU (aka XGold 608), where the iPhone 2G ran the PMB8876 (aka S-Gold 2). iPhone 4 uses the PMB9800, or X-Gold 618 – running a separate OS – ThreadX, an RTOS by ExpressLogic.

We had reported that MuscleNerd and planetbeing of the iPhone Dev team were having fun playing around with iPhone 4 baseband to figure out how to unlock it. It looks like they’ve made good progress as MuscleNerd has just tweeted:

Good progress on iPhone4 unlock with @planetbeing: http://is.gd/dh2WE <-injected cmd! (Akin to http://is.gd/dh2Ze on 3G) Next step is to keep the task backgrounded like we did for 3G/3GS http://is.gd/dh7Jh. Backgrounded task is the unlock.

As you can see in the screenshot below, they’ve managed to run arbitrary code on the iPhone’s baseband and are a step closer to unlocking iPhone 4 baseband.







MuscleNerd hasn’t provided any details about when the tools to unlock iPhone 4 will be available. But we doubt Dev Team will release them before Apple releases the iPhone software update (iOS 4.0.1) to fix the incorrect reporting of signal strength to address the iPhone 4 reception issues.

As always, we’ll let you know as soon as we’ve any further updates. So stay tuned here at iPhone Hacks or follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our RSS feed.

[via MuscleNerd