What would you do???

If you want it unlocked, it MUST be jailbroken.

Any phone thats from the USA, currently is from AT&T, so is yours.

Did you mean normal apps were quitting? Maybe you could just try restarting your phone.


If you want to restore the phone, I'd suggest backing up the phone right now, so you can reload your texts,calls,pictures etc after the restore.

edit: The 4.0.1 firmware on the iPhone3G is known to be quite slow and buggy. I had the same set up you did. If you want to restore the phone with 4.0.1 you'd have to
1. download the 4.0.1 IPSW file from this website http://www.felixbruns.de/iPod/firmware/ and then find the 4.0.1 firmware for iPhone3G.
2. Using sn0wbreeze jailbreak the phone
3. Use ultrasn0w to unlock it.

Use this website as a guide http://www.iclarified.com/jailbreak/

 

The 4.0.x software was notoriously bad on the 3G model. Apple just did not optimize its performance well enough for it to work fluidly on the older hardware.

Although I haven't tried it, word on the street is that 4.1 works much better on the iPhone 3G than 4.0(.1) ever did, so yes, it would be worth it for you to upgrade.

But we need to be crystal clear about something: you said you don't need for it to be jailbroken, just unlocked. Well, unfortunately, although this was possible with the original iPhone (2G), every subsequent iPhone model REQUIRES that it be jailbroken for the unlock to work/be installed. So you don't have a choice: if you want to use it unlocked, you HAVE to jailbreak it.

Also, this means that you need to be careful while upgrading to 4.1. Although you can upgrade to 4.1 through iTunes the normal way and then apply the jailbreak afterward, if you do that, you will not be able to unlock! This is because the iOS 4.1 upgrade comes with another piece of software: the phone's modem baseband. Currently, only the baseband software that came with 4.0, 4.0.1, and 4.0.2 is unlockable. The baseband software that comes with 4.1 hasn't been unlocked yet. The baseband software is written to a different memory chip than iOS itself is, and once the baseband is upgraded, it can never be downgraded again, and you will lose your unlock! Even if you downgrade iOS back to 4.0, the baseband will stay at the newer version and your unlock will be forefeit.

There is a way to upgrade to iOS 4.1 while keeping the baseband from 4.0. It's called PwnageTool, and you can get it from the iPhone Dev-Team's site at http://blog.iphone-dev.org/ -- what it allows you to do is to make a custom firmware file that is jailbroken and that doesn't include the baseband update. So if you tell iTunes to upgrade your phone with your custom iOS 4.1 firmware file made with PwnageTool, you are not at risk for losing your unlock.

PwnageTool is ONLY for Macintosh computers. If you have Windows, there is an equivalent program, written by a different group of guys, called Sn0wbreeze. You can download it at http://ih8sn0w.com/ and the latest version is 2.1. I have never used Sn0wbreeze myself, so if you have Windows and need to choose Sn0wbreeze and run into difficulties or have questions, someone else other than me will probably need to step in and help answer the rest of your questions.

Regardless of whether you use PwnageTool or Sn0wbreeze, I cannot stress enough that as long as you want your phone to be unlockable, you must never upgrade or restore your phone using the official Apple software updates. Always, ALWAYS upgrade your phone ONLY using custom firmware files made by either PwnageTool or Sn0wbreeze, and make sure when you use these programs to tell it to leave the baseband upgrade out! And when new Apple iOS software upgrades come out (like 4.2), you need to WAIT until PwnageTool or Sn0wbreeze is updated to support 4.2. DON'T upgrade your phone immediately to 4.2 UNTIL these programs are updated to help you keep your baseband.

As long as you do this, you will be fine and you won't lose your unlock.

Best of luck,

-- Nathan

EDIT: Also note that firmware files made by PwnageTool and Sn0wbreeze are pre-jailbroken. That means that your phone is already jailbroken after you install the custom firmware using iTunes. You don't need to do anything extra to jailbreak it: it's already done, because the jailbreak is built into the custom firmware.

EDIT #2: Make sure to grab PwnageTool from the Dev-Team's site. Not Redsn0w. Redsn0w is a different application (also written by the Dev-Team) that allows you to jailbreak a phone after you have installed the latest official Apple firmware. This is not what you want. If you upgrade to official Apple iOS 4.1 and then use Redsn0w to jailbreak, your unlock will be gone because by installing the official/unmodified Apple iOS 4.1 firmware to your phone, you upgraded the baseband, and thus forfeited your unlock.

 

Don't you Sn0wBreeze what ever you do! You'll have issues up the ass. Instead download a custom iPhone 3G 4.1 ipsw: http://xsellize.com/topic/84507-ios-41-custom-ipsw-files-downloads-iphone-3gs3g-ipod-3g2g/

Then download the newest version of Redsn0w: http://blog.iphone-dev.org/

 

Snowbreeze is junk. Don't use it.
But for a 3G I would downgrade to 3.1.3 instead of going up to 4.1
The 3G doesn't have the system resources to run 4.+ firmware as well as the 3GS or i4 and it will be slow as hell and things will crash when it runs low on ram.

 

Follow this: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=7443
After you're jailbroken open up cydia and install ultrasnow to unlock.
Done.

If after it restores thru itunes it gives you an error use tinyumbrella to kick the device out of recovery.
It does that sometimes when the firmware and baseband version dont match.

 

(...assuming we are still talking about 4.1 here...)

Yikes!!

NO

Do NOT RESTORE anything to your iPhone with iTunes OTHER THAN A CUSTOM IPSW.

You had:

Step 1: Restore with iTunes
Step 2: Create a custom IPSW
Step 3: Restore the custom IPSW with iTunes

Why do you have the first restore in your list if you are only going to restore it again later with the custom one? Why two restores? Why do you think it's necessary?

If you do a restore with iTunes without a custom IPSW (your step 1), YOU WILL LOSE YOUR CURRENT BASEBAND. Period. End of story.

There are only two steps here:

1. Create custom IPSW (or download from somewhere else), and make sure it has the baseband left out
2. Restore it to your phone with iTunes

That's it! There is no "first restore." There is only one restore total!

Not trying to be mean...just trying to make sure you understand!

(Maybe you just accidentally typed the wrong thing and you meant "backup" instead of "restore" for your step 1?)

Now if we are talking about going back to 3.1.3, you don't have to worry about a custom IPSW (although you can certainly do it that way, too). That's because the official 3.1.3 IPSW will include an older baseband than what your 4.0 phone already has, and basebands can't be downgraded. Even if it could be downgraded, the 3.1.3 baseband is unlockable anyway. So for 3.1.3, the simplest way to do it would probably be this:

1. Restore your phone using official 3.1.3. (Probably putting it into DFU beforehand would net you the greatest chance of success.)
2. iTunes will probably throw an error at the very end, and the phone is going to get stuck in recovery mode when you do this, most likely, so download TinyUmbrella (http://thefirmwareumbrella.blogspot.com/) and use it to kick it out of recovery mode.
3. After the phone is out of recovery mode and booting up normally, download and run Spirit on the phone (http://www.spiritjb.com/)

(Alternate to step 3: I believe http://jailbreakme.com/ also works with 3G phones running 3.1.3, and that might be even simpler.)

Good luck, and be careful!

-- Nathan