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A few weeks ago some friends from US have send to us an iPhone for testing purposes.We did not played too much with it because of AT&T network lock.As a result we have sent it back. Today I just notice a post about a new hack that unlocks the p…

Oh, and you lose visual voice mail (because that requires carrier support as well).

Apple might want to nip this in the bud to reassure AT&T. But honestly, iphones unlocked in this way will never get even close to 1%, which is to say the carriers with the exclusives will never know the difference.

Sadly, I personally, am a slave to a CDMA contract

I just read an article in last weeks Washington Post about Cellswapper.com – a carrier swapping service that made a killing by helping thousdands to get out of their Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint contracts in time for the iPhone launch.

Lucky Cellswapper. Now that this hack has been released, they will be making even more money – this time helping those same customers take their iPhone and get back to their old carriers as soon as possible, without having to pay any early termination fees.

This is bottom-of-the-barrel as far as Apple news goes. Did everyone forget that Apple needed network mods to get their phone to work (in toto) with a given network (hence the exclusivity)?

Next!

WOOHOO!!

Sprint is tops for data because they have more areas lit up for 3G, and don’t have very restrictive language to limit what you can do with it. (Being a total geek data is what matters to me, so I’m on Sprint.)

Compared with AT&T the only thing that Verizon and Sprint don’t have, both being EVDO carriers, is something that the newer HSDPA phones can do — you can be tethered to a laptop while talking at the same time. But perhaps VOIP could come to the rescue there. And note that the iPhone is NOT an HSDPA phone. Sadly it’s only 2G. Oh well. Still a cool piece of hardware.

If they act too aggressively to lock it back down, they risk seriously p***ing off a lot of their biggest fans. Word is that one of those unlock sites has 450,000 registrations of interest, and that’s just the people willing to register.

On the other hand, Apple are thought to be making $11/month from each new AT&T customer, and 10% from their recently agreed European partners. Each unlocked phone will forfeit that revenue.

But against that, they will sell a lot more phones.

Personally, I feel Apple was stupid to have not done something like this:

There was a rumor on Scott Bourne’s Apple Phone Show podcast in the weeks leading up to the June launch that Apple would sell an additional model alongside the others:

4 GB iPhone – $499 (locked to AT&T)
8 GB iPhone – $599 (locked to AT&T)
8 GB iPhone – $999 (unlocked)

The extra cost was to compensate for lost income from the revenue sharing deal. It wouldn’t have hurt AT&T, because people in the US still need service and AT&T is the only one with good nationwide coverage, a fair data plan (which the iPhone thrives on), and only AT&T, not T-Mobile, has the compelling visual voicemail feature. Most US people would buy the cheaper, networked locked model.

As someone currently not living in the US and needing to use an overseas carrier, I would have bought the $999 model on June 29.

So you lost that revenue from me, Apple. Judging from the massive interest in unlocking solutions, so would a lot of other people. More potential revenue lost.

As it was, I had to get the normal 8 GB model, use it as a super-iPod until August, and spend a fair amount of money and my time to get it unlocked. Apple got none of that. The same will soon be happening for people going with software unlocks.

The higher price point for an unlocked phone wouldn’t have affected the European launch, because again most (non hard core) people will want the cheaper price of the network locked phone, and to not have to go to the trouble of importing one. Those who want the flexibility could pay extra for it.

Since they chose not to do that, they’re now going to have to decide whether to deliberately break unlocked phones by leaving them stranded without updates.

If they do, there will be a lot of unhappy Apple customers around.

What value the “halo effect..?”