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Things to Know About Unlocking an IPhone

When you buy an iPhone in America, you are obliged to subscribe to a two-year service plan of AT&T, you are basically deprived of the opportunity to choose another carrier, whose pricing practices would be more suitable. And as it should be obvious, Apple of course gets millions of dollars from AT&T, just for bringing new and new customers when selling a new iPhone.

Those who buy an iPhone, have to activate the phone, through AT&T, to be able to use all the applications, the media player for instance, otherwise, the phone is useless. It is thus quite natural that attempts have been made to unlock the iPhone, to connect it to different carriers and use it in Europe as well.

The First Attempts at Unlocking the IPhone

As soon as September, after its release in late June, methods and softwares were in existence as to how to unlock the iPhone. Making use of different methods, many hackers, or groups of scientists have managed to unlock the iPhone. Jon Lech Johansen, one of the first to succeed, claimed to have unlocked the iPhone as soon as July, being able to use all the applications but without having to connect to AT&T.

By the end of August, George Hotz, an American teenager was also able to unlock his iPhone, with the combination of software commands and disassembling his phone, which though voids the official warranty. Then around the same time separate teams, Uniquephones, Gizmodo and a group from iPhoneSIMfree.com, were all working on developing a software unlock for the iPhone, with considerable success.

Unlocking has become quite general since then, and a number of iPhones sold worldwide are unlocked ones. For example in Germany, there was a brief time period when iPhones were officially sold unlocked because of some legal issues that were not in accordance with the American practices.

Dangers of Unlocking the iPhone

So, iPhones can be unlocked quite easily, especially nowadays. There are innumerable offers on the internet that are advertising the safest or easiest way to unlock your iPhone. Meanwhile, Apple is obviously trying to stop this, they have a lot to lose, they are bound to AT&T to basically make the customers stay with them and they have a lot to lose moneywise as well.

So if you unlock your iPhone not using an appropriate sofware, it can happen that your iPhone is rendered useless right away, or if Apple is clever enough, it can happen that your iPhone is rendered useless with the new Apple software update that you are just to download to improve your iPhone. By all means, wait before others download the update, as otherwise you may have a shiny and trendy but quite useless object worth several hundred dollars.

Last 5 posts by Charlie Reese

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