Get your iPhone officially unlocked - for FREE - via iTunes

problem: Your iPhone is SIM locked

Your provider had your phone locked when you took on your contract... now you want to use a different SIM but it doesn't work.

solution: Ask your provider to unlock the phone!

It really should be very simple and FREE. For example o2 in the UK provide a online form for their customers and they'll unlock the phone within 14 days. This probably works for more than just iPhones too. Read more about o2's process on their site.

What is the catch? As you can imagine, there is likely a minimum contract term that needs to be fulfilled with most providers or at least they might claim that there is. Most countries have laws related to SIM locking and it depends on the providers and countries stance on such laws. Read more on SIM locking on wikipedia.

I went through the o2 process with a family members iPhone and it was totally painless. They quoted 14 days but it took less than 48 hours. A picture of the official unlocking in iTunes!

The process went like this:

1. Googled iPhone unlocking, found Olly's post linked below
2. Went to o2's site and search for unlocking etc
3. Found the unlocking FAQ article on o2's site
4. Filled out the unlocking form (dead easy)
5. Received the SMS from o2 that the phone had been unlocked
6. IMPORTANT: Inserted non o2 sim in to the phone
7. Powered the phone on
8. With an computer connected to the net, sync'ed the iPhone with iTunes
9. After a brief wait, the iPhone received updated carrier programming and the new SIM was operational

citation:

A big thanks and props to Olly Farshi @ giga om for sharing his knowledge and experience on this topic.

iTunes is out of sync with ID3 tags

problem: iTunes is out of sync with ID3 tags

• You've used a tool to manage your MP3 ID3 tags and iTunes is out of sync with the changes
• You would like to refresh ID3 tags on selected tracks in iTunes or your entire iTunes Library

impact: grrrrrr

This is rather frustrating, all that hard work to manage your tags and iTunes gives you the middle finger and your ID3 tags are out of date...

solution:

This should work for _ALL_ iTunes versions up to the time of writing, which is 10.1.
In theory it should also work on all platforms too.

1. First off, close iTunes if open, make sure its dead
2. Make sure the tracks you want to work with are not read only
   You can protect iTunes from modifying your tracks by settings files to read only
3. Open iTunes
4. Select the tracks that you want to refresh
   You can select _ALL_ but be warned the more you select, the longer the process will take. I strongly suggest being selective, at least until you've mastered the technique
5. With the tracks selected press CTRL+I
   You can also right click or activate the context menu and click "Get Info"
6. Make sure NO checkboxes are checked
7. Select the sorting tab
8. Enter anything you like into a blank sorting field
   This will check the checkbox for the specific field
9. Double check only the sorting checkbox is selected
10. Click OK
11. iTunes will show a progress bar as it applies changes
12. You should see the tracks now have the latest ID3 tags
13. Repeat to remove the sort tag when your happy

Note a positive side effect of this operation... any missing files that were selected will now have the exclamation mark next to it, might be helpful to some :)

citation:

I've combined methods from these pages
Props to Kishore @ Chinto's blog
and Yoricko @ Harmonic Mixing Community