Germans Can Now Unlock iPhone Using iTunes

Germans Can Now Unlock iPhone Using iTunes

How much would you pay for an unlocked iPhone?

Would you pay more money just so you could have an unlocked iPhone?

T-Mobile is going to charge the equivalent of $1,478 for an unlocked iPhone in Germany, after deciding Wednesday to comply with a preliminary injunction issued by a court at the request of Vodafone, a rival carrier. The carrier will continue to challenge the court's decision, but it seems that locking phones to a specific carrier is against German law.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

According to T-Mobile's Web site, "numerous functions remain exclusively available to T-Mobile customers with a Complete rate plan." The only feature that the company singles out as missing, however, is the visual voicemail. T-Mobile also says it has a more complete EDGE network than its rivals, but those looking to switch to Vodafone or other carriers may not care so long as they get data access in their city or town.

It will be interesting to see how much value people place on an unlocked iPhone. According to Reuters, a locked iPhone in Germany will cost you $2,330 over the life of a two-year contract: $1,740 for the service plan and $590 for the iPhone. T-Mobile said it will still offer that deal for iPhones locked to its network, and that the special iPhone rate plans are 40 percent cheaper than the "comparative use" of another data-enabled phone through T-Mobile.

To many, cell-phone unlocking is a matter of personal freedom, in that they bought a device and want to use it with whatever service provider they choose. After all, we aren't hooked to Comcast or AT&T's broadband networks for 24 months after we buy a new PC or Mac. But there's probably quite a few potential customers who don't care and just want to jump on the iPhone train for the cheapest possible fare.

One thing is probably certain: half the mobile phone resellers on the planet just booked flights to Germany. Unlocking iPhones wasn't too difficult a process before, but it did involve modifying software and was subject to retaliation from Apple in the form of software updates, such as the infamous OS X 1.1.1 update. A clean, straight-from-the-factory unlocked iPhone could command a higher price than one that had been jail broken and unlocked using the current methods.

Still, will it command upwards of $1,500 in order to make resale worth the effort? I have no idea, but there's no way in hell I'd pay even close to that much for a phone without 3G data networking or GPS just so I could run it outside of a particular carrier's network. And then I'd still have to pay some carrier how ever much a month, at least $50, to make it work. Even assuming that somebody offers me that cheap a data plan, I'd wind up paying $2,678 over two years, as compared with the $2,330 I'd pay over the life of T-Mobile's two-year contract.

That, of course, is probably not a coincidence. T-Mobile might have to offer an unlocked iPhone, but there's apparently no requirement as to how much they have to charge for it. And if Apple struck the same kind of revenue-sharing deal with Deutsche Telecom, T-Mobile's parent, as it did with AT&T, the companies have to come up with some way to make sure Apple gets its cut.

Apple and Orange (ha!) will also have to offer an unlocked iPhone for the French market to comply with that country's telecom laws. The phone will go on sale next week, and will command a "premium" price, according to the International Herald Tribune.. Now maybe we have some idea of just how much a premium, but will people be willing to pay?

How much would you pay for an unlocked iPhone?

iPhoneSIMFree Releases First 1.1.1 SIM Unlock, Fixes AnySIM-Bricked iPhones

• TOPIC:
• apple
• iphone
• iphone sim free
• iphone unlock
• iphonesimfree
• unlocking

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/iphone-unlock/iphonesimfree-releases-first-111-sim-unlock-fixes-anysim+bricked-iphones-309571.php

There's more than one way to break your phone free of Apple and AT&T's constraints, but for now the rewards barely outweigh the drawbacks

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The day the iPhone was released in June, a cottage industry sprang up with the goal of freeing the phone from the restrictions Apple (AAPL) and its partner, AT&T, have placed on it. The top goal has been to eliminate the requirement that all iPhone buyers sign up for two years of AT&T (T) service. It appears they have succeeded, but the results are not for everyone.

I've spent the past week or so testing an "unlocked" iPhone supplied by a Canadian company called PureMobile. To release the phone from AT&T's control, the company modifies Apple's hardware based on a procedure spelled out by George Hotz, a 17-year-old student at Rochester Institute of Technology. The phone, sold on the PureMobile Web site, costs around $600, which is $200 more than the just-slashed price of a standard 8-gigabyte iPhone.

I used the unlocked iPhone on the T-Mobile and AT&T wireless networks after inserting SIMs (the small cards in each phone that identify the subscriber) swapped from my other mobile phones. There were a few hitches. With a non-AT&T SIM, I had to change some simple settings to gain access to e-mail or the Web over the phone network. And neither of the two SIM cards allowed me to use the iPhone's visual voicemail feature, which lets the user go straight to any voice message by selecting it from a list on the screen. On the plus side, the unlocked iPhone let me cruise around on Wi-Fi networks without any SIM card at all. You can't do that on a locked iPhone. Oddly enough, the YouTube application did not work on this PureMobile unit.

Warranty Voided

Some of these capabilities are very cool, but the unlocked phone makes sense only for customers who have a good reason not to go with the standard AT&T deal—such as living outside the U.S. and really, really craving an iPhone. You'll still be stuck with relatively slow phone networks, even in Europe, and there's the fact that the hardware modification voids the Apple warranty. PureMobile is working on a third-party warranty arrangement, but don't expect to get any tech support from Apple for a modified iPhone.

There's also the possibility, which PureMobile warns of on its Web site, that a future Apple software update might relock the phone and leave you with an elegant but expensive brick. You can get around that by refusing to accept updates, but then you can't use new applications, such as Wi-Fi access to the iTunes Store. Nor will you get updated bug fixes and security patches. The phone I was testing was already behind on Apple software updates, and I didn't dare try installing the latest version of iTunes.

As you might expect, there's more than one way to unlock an iPhone. A company called iPhoneSimFree has a software patch that rewrites some of the iPhone's built-in code. This avoids warranty issues, but its legality may be challenged under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (Both AT&T and Apple declined to comment on the subject.) iPhoneSimFree's U.S. retailer, Wireless Imports, is taking advance orders for the $99 software.

The Hacker Option

There's one other effort I should mention, from a band of hackers—in the original sense of programmers who want to take things apart and make them work better. Called the iPhone Dev Team, they're working on both unlocking the network and making it possible for iPhone owners to install applications beyond those Apple has chosen to supply. I can recommend this software only for adventurous folks who have some knowledge of how Apple's OS X software works. Besides, at this point there really aren't any compelling programs to download to your iPhone.

While these projects may not be attractive to most ordinary iPhone users, they are important. The iPhone is too good a product to be limited to the narrow choices that Apple and AT&T want to offer. More power to the folks who are working, often as volunteers, to make the product better.

Wildstrom

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2007/tc20070912_736346.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index

It appears that A&T is making threatening noises in direction of folks who have been developing software that will let an iPhone be used without AT&T activation. AT&T ought to chill out instead.

Since the company says it is not subsidizing the price of the iPhone, it's not like would-be unlockers are going to take the subsidy and run, which is a wireless operator's main reason for wanting to block unlocking. A U.S. owner of an unlocked iPhone only has two choices, neither of them terribly appealing. One is to use only Wi-Fi wireless, but I'm not sure I get the point of an iPhone that isn't a phone. The other is the use it on the T-Mobile network, which doesn't confer any particular advantage, unless you happen to be in one of the few area's where T-Mo's service is better than AT&T's.

The real demand for unlocked phones is coming from the 90% of the world where you cannot use an AT&T iPhone without paying extravagant roaming charges. And what skin is it off AT&T's back if someone wants to use an iPhone on the Vodafone or Orange network?

Meanwhile, the folks who are bit by bit unraveling the mysteries of the iPhone that Apple and AT&T have tried so hard to keep secret are doing everyone a favor. The iPhone is a revolutionary device, but the desire of Apple and AT&T to keep it within a garden with very high walls is a huge step backward--and one that increasingly looks doomed to failure.

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2007/08/att_vs_iphone_u.html

Posted Aug 22nd 2007 12:09PM by Sean Cooper
Filed under: 

Well, it seems another site has popped up promising iPhone unlocking, and honestly, we've seen this so many times now that the grains of salt storehouse is dead empty. Iphonesimfree does have a fresh approach to its claim of an unlock solution by inviting media to submit a request to have their handset unlocked in the next 48 hours. Of course, we're all signed up, but the catch is they will only do this for the "top three applicants" -- let's hope we fit the bill. The word on the site -- if you believe anything they are peddling -- is that the software unlock will wander into retail shortly after the 48 hours are up. Keep an eye on this space for more info in the next couple days.

I found this at
http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2007/08/22/iphone-software-unlock-promised-within-48-hours/