“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.]
primus is not a nationwide brand, and building a network from scratch takes a long time and a lot of money
telus is CDMA, the iPhone is GSM – the iPhone is not compatible with telus’s network
while i’m not a rogers fan (altho fido has treated me well), they (or fido) are the only nationwide GSM carriers in Canada, and thus the only choice.
Well I got my iPhone here in Australia yesterday. It was a very simple process to jailbreak it and then to unlock it for use with my carrier Optus. I have been using it now for 24 hours and it is by far the best phone/ipod I have ever had.
It will continue to get even better with software updates and third party apps of which I have already downloaded a couple just for fun. It is a pure joy to use and you should see how many complete strangers have come up to me and wanted to see it and are saying they want one too.
I want an iphone but AT&T;has horrible service in Eastern North Carolina so I won’t buy one- plus as a business owner I have my phones under a group rate with Alltel. So Apple gets no more of my money… why would I want a phone that doesn’t work in the areas where I do business????
In response to the comment on the Hiptop, Fido carried the hiptop with a 20$ unlimited data plan up until shortly after Fido was purchased by Rogers. Clearly a product with unlimited data for such a low rate made Rogers other data products appear ridiculously overpriced (rightly so), and they removed the Hiptop off from their product offerings.
True that the Hiptop was not very popular in Canada, but it received absolutely no marketing, and most people were unaware that it existed. The same product in the US branded as the Tmobile Sidekick is immensely popular. You can’t walk down any street without seeing somebody typing away on their Sidekick.
As for swapping sim cards, I assure you this won’t work because the data passes through the Hiptop manufacturer’s servers where it is compressed in order to speed up web browsing and optimize it for a small screen.
I for one hope that the iPhone comes to Canada just so that it will once again make sense for Rogers/Fido to carry the Hiptop which at that point will have the same price for data as the iPhone.