History of Apple Inc.
The first version of the iPhone became publicly available on June 29, 2007 in selected countries/markets. It was another 12 months before the iPhone 3G became available on July 11, 2008. Apple announced the iPhone 3GS on June 8, 2009, along with plans to release it later in June, July, and August, starting with the U.S., Canada and major European countries on June 19. This 12-month iteration cycle has continued with the iPhone 4 model arriving in similar fashion in 2010, a Verizon model was released in February 2011, and a Sprint model in October 2011, shortly after Jobs' death.
History of iPhone
Also on August 24, 2007, Engadget reported, by way of photos and a video clip, that they were called by the "iPhoneSimFree" team, who offered to show Engadget a demonstration of unlocking iPhone using a software-only method. Unlike Hotz's hardware hack, the code in this hack was not made available to the general public. Sales of the unlock started on September 10. These sales occurred through several resellers who were able to order "keys" from iPhoneSimFree, then pass the "keys" to customers, allowing the customers to use the software. On September 11, after one day of sales, the iPhone Dev Team announced that they had created a working "software unlock", and released it to the public for free. Utilizing requires some technical knowledge, although a simpler, GUI-based version was under construction. AnySim and iUnlock Reloaded, two free, GUI-based unlocking programs, have since been made available.