“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,” Stephen H. Wildstrom reports for BusinessWeek.
With an unlocked iPhone, you can’t 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,” Wildstrom reports. Also, “the YouTube application did not work…”
Wildstrom reports, “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.”
Wildstrom reports, “There’s also the possibility… 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.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Linux Guy And Mac Prodigal Son” for the heads up.]