Not as much of a rip-off as France; reportedly they're not going to have unlimited data!!! As much data as this thing eats????

Yes you can do that. Just google ibrickr. Should walk you through EVERYTHING you need. If you do want to use the phone portion; simply go pick up a T-mobile or AT&T prepaid account. I have my iPhone on T-mobile now and am loving it. I don't miss visual voicemail.

Cat and mouse. Given that the hardware is frozen, it's unlikely Apple can truly lock it up drum-tight. The unlock doesn't try to compromise the SIM-Radio interface, etc, and by law in MANY places the phone *must* be unlockable. So Apple can't completely remove the functionality or hard-code the SIM lock.

They may defeat the current hack but I doubt it. Why would they bother? The vast majority of consumers don't know and don't care about unlocking and jailbreaking, etc. They have enough trouble just getting the device working as advertised! The early adopters are mostly now locked into AT&T contracts so AT&T will extract it's pound of flesh if someone wants to leave. I don't think they'll do anything... the ability to mod the device will spur more sales. A development ecosystem centered around their hardware can't be a bad thing.

AT&T shouldn't be complaining as the vast majority of buyers will take the easy default option. Not only are they gaining adds, they're pulling die-hard customers away from other carriers who specifically WANT the iPhone but otherwise wouldn't look at AT&T. That's why they agreed to revenue sharing; the device is the only one on the market that is compelling enough to drive mass defections to their network.... and it's great mind-share. Whatever revenue AT&T are giving up they probably made back 10-fold in free advertising and getting people in the store who may not buy an iPhone but wanted to look at one anyway. Getting 'em in is the greatest challenge.

So if people are using an unlocked unit with prepaid plans, you get no data right?

My T-Mobile prepaid doesn't let you do data AFAIK.

Now THIS is funny. I guess steve and i agree at least on verbiage!

Asked the question �Is unlocking a concern?� at the company�s �Mum� special event, Apple CEO Steve Jobs responded, �It�s a constant cat and mouse game�we have the same thing with the iPod with music.� Jobs then looked at O2 CEO Matthew Key, asking, �Are we the cat or mouse? We have to stay one step ahead of them.�

Oh please! Like he could say anything else in front of the guy who just coughed up 40% of his revenue for an exclusive.

i know, has anyone confirmed the 40% rumour?

Buy your iPhone unlocked or for $150 off the unlocked price with a TMobile contract.

http://www.mobilebee.com/Apple-iPhone.html


I almost fell out of my chair laughing at this. Ive bought about 4 phones from these folks, I saw this because Im on their mailing list. Funny as hell

hehe
I seen iphones on ebay going at $350-400 w/o contract
simoncells have em for the same price. I used to have a dealer contract with them, wonder if I still do...

They'll have quite a bit of explaining to do if Apple decides to lock the phone again at the next firmware update.

$250 above retail. Not bad.

Wirelessly posted (TMobile DASH: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; IEMobile 6.12) T-Mobile Dash)

Yea, i was wondering how they were dealing with that.

Nothing forces a consumer to load a firmware update.

I was already an ATT customer and I bought an iPhone last week. EDGE could be faster, sure, but other than that I'm quite happy with my purchase. $399 felt like the right price for it.

A friend (a notorious cheapskate) played with it for about 5 minutes and he will be buying one once his Verizon contract expires in March. He said it was the all-in-one device he's been waiting for. Without the existing contract, he would've bought one that same day.

No, but if Apple issues a firmware with new features most users will want to install it. Nowhere on the sales page did it say that Apple could effectively turn your $600 phone into a brick.

Also, there are reports of Apple blacklisting hacked phones.

Apple has to at least appear to un-do the unlocking.

They have these different carriers in different countries vying to carry the product, locking people into contracts at prices higher than people are used to paying (especially in Europe where prepaid plans are more popular).

So in order to get favorable contracts with these carriers, they have to appear to try to keep people in these contracts.

Same way they're probably not too crazy about the ring tone pricing so they make it easy to hack but once it's hacked, they have to try to undo the hack to placate the RIAA.

Apple (reportedly) get $3/month per subscriber + $8/month for a new to T subscriber. Thats serious money.

Where are these reports of blacklisting being posted? I haven't seen them yet, and as my wife and I are new his and hers owners of hacked phones (though running on the AT&T network), want to keep up to date.

Last night while sync'ing my phone, iTunes did ask if it could send data back to Apple. The Details button showed what looked like core dump files, so I declined the request.