Unlocked iPhone

July 2, 2007

Friday I appeared on KQED and said you couldn’t stick a European SIM chip in an iPhone, but it appears someone has unlocked the darn thing and is selling the 4 GB model for a 160% PREMIUM. $1299 vs. $599 at your local Apple or AT&T store. Wow, didn’t take long for someone to prove me wrong.

Update: As the commenter said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” So therefore, I may not be wrong at all. There’s very little evidence here and he argues it’s all designed to game Google to improve your search engine optimization.

But in other news, it turns out the iPhone can operate as a WiFi device without the SIM card. One resourceful hacker at TUAW (The unofficial Apple Weblog) hacked it open, pulled out the SIM card and stuck in his defunct SIM card and tried a few other combinations.

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  • eas
    I'll believe it when I see it.

    Even if they do get it unlocked, I'm not sure how much good it will do. Some of the phone features (Visual Voicemail, Push IMAP) rely on specialized infrastructure. The mobile data relies on EDGE, which isn't widely deployed (only Tmobile in the US, some in south america, I don't think anywhere in Europe).

    I'm enthusiastic about the time when iPhones aren't tied to a single provider, and are open to 3rd party apps, but until someone delivers actual credible evidence that they've unlocked an iPhone, I'm not going to link to them. My guess is that pretty much all these sites are doing it because they know people will link to them, boosting their Google Pagerank for SEO purposes.
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