How can I tell if my iphone is unlocked?

I called AT&T on 11/19 to ask to have my old iPhone 3Gs (out of contract for 1.5 years, and have not been AT&T customer for 1 year) to be unlocked. They asked for the IMEI number, and then told me all I had to do was back up and restore, which I did a few hours later and the phone is unlocked. I waited at most 8 hours.

Good luck.

You must connect the phone to iTunes and click the Restore button on the iPhone summary screen (NOT Restore from Backup). At the end of the restore process if the unlock has been successful you will get a message that says "Congratulations, your phone is unlocked".

If you don't get this message either AT&T did not enter the unlock order or your phone was previously jailbroken, in which case you cannot get it unlocked legitimately.

Was your iPhone sold by AT&T? The operator specifically asked if phone was an AT&T phone before she sent the request over to Apple which properly limits unlock requests to phones sold by that vendor. My phone was previously jailbroken and unlocked, and I restored to a custom 5.1 firmware by Option-Clicking on the Restore button in iTunes. I played the cat & mouse game of jailbreaking/unlocking for years and would probably be classified as a rogue phone if Apple had such a definition, so if my phone can be unlocked using the official means, I bet any phone can. 🙂

So to get this straight, if I had jailbroken my old iPhone 4, but then restored it to iOS 6 (which is no longer jailbroken), I still can't carrier unlock? I got an approval from ATT but no congrats message when restoring a few days after...

It is not always possible to undo the damage done by jailbreaking. You can't get help here MadParty. Discussing jailbroken devices is forbidden by the terms of service.

Jailbreaking voids any warranty or AppleCare agreement and forfeits all rights to support here and from Apple.

Try google. maybe you'll have some luck there.

Yeah it's an old device that was jailbroken in the past. It's not my primary iPhone and is no longer jailbroken. I just want it to be on iOS 6 and carrier unlocked by ATT so I can use it with a local sim overseas.

Thanks.

As I said. It is NOT always possible to un-jailbreak it.

This is what you need to do:

1. Go to website "imei.info" (without quotation marks of course)

2. You will enter your phone' IMEI which you can locate by clicking on settings, general, about. It is a 13 digits number, starting with 99

3. Click "check"

4. The check will give you the information about the phone

5. Scroll down where you will see three options: Report an error, Check network and sim lock , Free sim lock and warranty status check.

6. In your case, you need to know if your iPhone is unlocked or not, so you can use the last option

I hope this helps. Note: you may need to purchase points if you need to recheck the information.

Thanks! Will check it out.

That site is a hoax. There is no way to know if your phone is unlocked from the IMEI, except by asking Apple directly. Unless, of course, that site has hacked Apple's activation server.

Maybe I'll just try the obvious solution and get a T Mobile sim and see if it works..

That's a good, reliable way 🙂