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Rebel yell

Posted on 28 Apr 2009 at 12:26

Paul Ockenden looks at an alternative to removing the SIM lock on expensive phones, and tweaks his Touch HD.

And what's the cutter for? As I mentioned above there are two versions of the Rebel Simcard, the original that I bought - that has its chip on the side of the wafer facing the SIM card - and the "no cut" version, which has its chip on the other face. With the original you need to cut a small hole in the SIM to make space for the chip (it's well away from the contacts and the actual gubbins). The supplied hole punch does that, and comes with a SIM-sized template to ensure you cut the hole in exactly the right place, but I reckon you could manage it by careful use of an office hole punch or even a scalpel. The "no cut" version of the Rebel Simcard has the chip on the other face, but will therefore only work in phones where there's a suitable space inside the SIM slot, which include the iPhone 3G, the Nokia 95 and a few more. I decided to go for the original, because I have loads of phones to test here and wanted the one that was more universal.

I tried one of my Rebel cards with a Vodafone SIM in a UK iPhone and it didn't work. I also tried it with an O2 SIM in a T-Mobile-locked BlackBerry, and again it didn't work. Not a very good start. But then I noticed that Solutions Point had written v44 on the boxes of cards I'd bought, whereas the website currently shows the latest firmware version as v61i. The next step was obviously to upgrade the firmware on the cards, and this is where the programmer comes in. It's designed to accept normal thickness SIMs, but comes with a dummy SIM (complete with cut-out) so that the wafer-thin Rebel Simcard will fit. Updating the firmware was easy - simply run an executable downloaded from the website that takes only a few seconds. Once I'd done that the iPhone did work, or at least it did at first.

Then I tried swapping in various SIMs and suddenly it all ground to a halt again with nothing working. I wasn't supplied with any instructions, but after digging around on the Rebel Simcard website I found a video that explained how in certain circumstances you need to refresh the 2G and 3G network keys in your SIM by using it in an unlocked phone. Briefly summarised, you need to switch that phone to manual network selection, try to register it on a network other than the one the SIM belongs to, at which point you'll get a registration error, then switch it back to the proper network. At that point, the SIM will get updated with the latest network authentication keys. If you want to use 3G you'll have to go through this same process all over again, but with 3G switched on and 2G switched off. Luckily, I had an unlocked Nokia N95 to hand, and these kinds of things are really easy to do with that phone.

Once I'd gone through all that palaver the Rebel Simcard worked just fine, and I was able to use an unmodified iPhone on the Vodafone network without any problems. I was able to do everything I could using the original O2 SIM, including accessing and downloading stuff from iTunes and the App Store, viewing YouTube and iPlayer videos, sending and receiving emails, and of course making phone calls. I was also able to use a T-Mobile BlackBerry on various other networks and the phone bits all worked, although I couldn't actually use its BlackBerry functionality because that requires a special APN to be enabled on the account.

I can't in all honesty say the Rebel Simcard is a complete success, due to the hassle of having to upgrade its firmware and then reset the network keys using another phone, but once it was all set up and configured properly it worked fine. I'll certainly be making use of those five cards I bought, and I'd recommend them to anyone who needs to unlock an expensive phone but doesn't trust dodgy market geezers.