unlocking

A blue mat, a fine-tipped screwdriver, and a dozen itty bitty screws. This is Titus Green's workspace, set within a warehouse that processes 2 million pounds of unwanted electronic waste each year.

Green, 22, and his team at San Francisco Bay Area e-waste collection center Green Citizen, refurbish 30 cell phones a day to put back into customers' hands.

If you don't chuck your electronics down the trash chute (and please don't,) the most likely cycle is that the phone will be refurbished and resold, one way or another.

Of the appliances that come through Green Citizen'… Read more

It's official -- unlocked iPhone 5 smartphones are now on sale in the U.S.

As of today, instead of choosing from carriers Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon when buying the device at the online Apple Store, the tech giant is also offering the option of an "unlocked and contract-free" iPhone 5.

By selling the smartphone unlocked, it means that users can insert nano-SIM cards from any supported carrier for use on the network, as opposed to the locked phones, which are tied to the carrier they purchased the phone from.

However, the feature comes at … Read more

Apple will begin selling an unlocked version of the iPhone 5 tonight through its online store in the U.S., according to a new report.

Citing retail sources, 9to5Mac says Apple will quietly kick off sales of the unlocked device on its online store this evening, later doing the same at its retail stores.

The news comes as supply of the iPhone 5 is easing, with new orders from Apple's online site shipping in one week, down from the nearly month-long delay shortly after the product's launch in September.

By selling it unlocked, it means that users can … Read more

JailbreakMe is an app that jailbreaks (unlocks from a specific carrier) your iPhone. It allows full access to all functions built into the iPhone, as well as some apps that are not available through the App Store. JailbreakMe is itself not available through the App Store but is on many download sites including the authors' sites.

Before running JailbreakMe you should make a backup through iTunes so you can restore the iPhone to its original state should you have problems with JailbreakMe or any app installed once broken. Installing the app is as simple as running the download and then … Read more

T-Mobile today added Baltimore, Houston, and Washington, D.C. to the list of U.S. cities served by 4G (HSPA+) on its faster 1900 network.

"As a part of our $4 billion plan to transform our network, T-Mobile continues to strengthen an already fast and competitive 4G experience in major metro areas across the country by installing new equipment and retuning our 4G airwaves to work with more devices," T-Mobile USA Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray said in a statement today.

One of the devices that the carrier specifically highlighted to get the faster 4G coverage is the … Read more

Apple's Web site may have unintentionally leaked yet another detail about the iPhone 5: the prices for the unlocked version.

A search on Apple's Web site for "iPhone 5 factory unlocked" initially comes up empty, but a sidebar shows results for the iPhone 5 with prices that would fall in line with past unlocked prices. Apple Insider reader Dhaval Dinani first spotted the results.

The prices range from $649 and $849, depending on the amount of memory space, and the Apple page lists both the GSM and CDMA and the white and black versions of the … Read more

RAR Password Unlocker detects and cracks lost or forgotten passwords protecting RAR archives. It offers three methods of tackling lost passwords: Brute Force, Brute Force with User-Defined Mask, and Dictionary mode, which tries password combinations against a built-in dictionary that you can customize. It can also automatically save and resume interrupted recovery operations and search for archives in your system. It's free to try, but the trial version only recovers the first three letters of the password and limits dictionary searches to 10,000 possible combinations. If that's enough to jog your memory, you're in luck. But … Read more

When you strip it all away -- the e-mail and texting, the voice navigation, and Angry Birds -- your smartphone isn't a smartphone at all. It's a radio.

The job of a radio is to detect, receive, and maintain the signal that leashes the cell phone to the network. When you turn on your phone, it chirps out data that lets the network know another cell phone has hopped on board.

The network authenticates the phone, and the phone is free to send and receive data or calls. In other words, more fundamentally than software and the processor, … Read more

One would think that if you bought an iPhone 5 at full price and off-contract that it would already be unlocked. Apparently, that is only partially correct.

While Verizon sells Apple's next-generation smartphone at full price already unlocked out of the box, that is apparently not the case with AT&T. Normally, AT&T customers who opt to pay the full $649 price instead of agreeing to a two-year contract for a subsidized iPhone must follow a lengthy process to get handset unlocked.

Those AT&T customers must fill out a Web form, send a fax to AT&T, and wait as long as a week for word on whether it will allow the device to be unlocked.

However, it now appears that unsubsidized AT&T iPhones ship unlocked and that off-contract customers can save a lot of hassle and time by simply restoring the device in iTunes. … Read more