After a year with the iPhone 3G, I upgraded to the 3GS. The upgrade cost me money and as a result, the original iPhone now belongs to me. Consequently I now “own” 2 iPhones – the original one which is mine outright and the 3GS which is in contract for another 12 months, when it too will become mine. That’s 2 iPhones, but just one SIM. It would be useful therefore to be able to use my old Orange pay-as-you-go SIM in my old iPhone 3G, as a backup phone, but I can’t do this because the phone is locked to O2 only.

So, how do I unlock it? Either I use some kind of jailbreak software, or, perhaps there’s an official O2 unlocking service for phones that are out of contract.

I called O2 this morning to ask. It took about 2 minutes to get through to an operator, so I asked my question, and as expected the bloke on the end of the line didn’t know, so he put me on hold whilst he went to ask someone else.

He came back after 6 minutes to apologize for the time taken and ask if I’d like to hold more (extra brownie points there). He was talking to someone on the other line. He said he was talking “to Apple” to find out about it and would call me back (even more brownie points for not keeping me on hold).

An hour later he called back to say that unlocking my phone is not something they can do. All brownie points were immediately revoked.

Do I really have to jailbreak my phone to be able to use it on another network, or is there an alternative that O2 don’t know (or don’t want me to know) about?