Have an iPhone? Want to get top dollar for it? It’s extremely easy. I’ve jailbroken every iPhone since I got my the first one on launch day in June of last year. The jailbreak process was difficult back in the day but a little app called ZiPhone makes it incredibly easy to jailbreak and unlock the iPhone.

I was going to settle for a next to nothing resale value on my 16Gb iPhone after the 3G model was announced but a scan of eBay showed 8 and 16GB iPhones going for nearly 30% more than their retail value. Why? Well, it’s a combination of a couple of things.

1. You can’t find 1st generation iPhones anymore. Apple has emptied all channels of the previous generation iPhone
2. The iPhone 3G and original iPhone may be sold in a few dozen countries but there are still many places in the world that don’t have the iPhone and people will pay top dollar for a chance to own one.
3. As far as I know, the 3G iPhone can’t be unlocked so the original iPhones are in high demand.

I didn’t hesitate to list mine and Laura’s iPhones on eBay as “unlocked & jailbroken” and if I made just enough money for two 3G iPhones, that would be good enough for me. Well, there are 5 days left on the sale of my 16Gb iPhone and it’s already exceeded $450 dollars! This iPhone will probably sell for about $600 dollars which is pretty amazing for the last generation model.

Unlocking the iPhone was so easy that anyone can do it. I plugged the iPhone in, closed iTunes and opened Ziphone (which is cross-platform). In the main window, there’s an option to Unlock & Jailbreak or just Jailbreak the phone. I opted to Unlock and after about 5 minutes, my phone had the Installer application and was ready for any sim card worldwide. There was zero interaction on my part and I doubled the resale value of the phone.

The 3G iPhone release can’t come any sooner for me and my new found wealth.