How To Check iPhone 3GS And Other iPhone's Manufacturing Week [Guide]

March 3, 2012

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Though this information may not be that valuable for every other iPhone user but some people really need to know this. We’ve already covered a guide in which we explained a method by which you can get almost every information regarding your iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and every iOS device but I personally got a lot of emails from iPhone 3GS owners who rely on unlock and wanted to check their manufacturing week. Let me give you a little summary of your iPhone 3GS’ manufacturing week importance. When people got their handsets lock on iOS 5 they had only one solution to unlock it and that was by patching iPad baseband 6.15.00 on their iPhone 3GS. But this method don’t work for every device, Apple’s 2011 iPhone 3GS 8GB batch carries a new Toshiba baseband chip which don’t support iPad baseband patching. So what are the consequences if you update your phone which was manufactured after 28th week of 2011– well you’d loose your WiFi, IMEI, ECID, Blutooth numbers. All these fields would be blank and I’m not sure if it can be fixed or not because I didn’t try fixing it personally.

There are some guides available which explains a manual way of checking your iPhone 3GS manufacturing week but we’ll try to combine all of them and dedicate this to iPhone 3GS user so they get to choose from two three options. Though this guide will primarily be focused on iPhone 3GS but that doesn’t mean other iPhone and iOS owners can’t check their device information by using the methods which we will cover today. So let’s begin:

Method 1: Manual Serial Number Decoding

First you need to check your iPhone’s serial number and in order to do that go to Settings>General>About and scroll down until you see your iPhone’s serial number. Now there are two ways of decoding the information hidden behind your iPhone’s serial number.

“Serial numbers come in the form AABCCDDDEEF which can be read as follows:

AA = Factory and machine ID

B = Year manufactured (simplified to final digit, 2010 is 0, 2011 is 1, etc)

CC = Week of production

DDD = Unique identifier (not the same as UDID)

EE = Color of device

F = Size of storage, S is 16GB and T is 32GB

For example, the serial 79049XXXA4S is from factory 79 (presumably Foxconn), was manufactured in the 49th week, and is a black 16GB iPhone 4.”

Method 2: Website

If you’re still not sure about your iPhone 3GS’ manufacturing week or you cannot decode your serial number correctly then there’s an easy way out, you can just head over to this site and enter your iPhone’s serial number you noted in Method 1. This website will provide you almost every little information about your device including it’s manufacturing week.

Method 3: iTools

We covered a third party tools couple of days ago which has a lot useful features but we focused on just one which was it’s ability to tell you about your iPhone’s parent carrier. You can also use iTools by following our guide posted here to check your iPhone 3GS’ manufacturing week.