Sunday, April 20, 2008

An Unlocked Iphone for Beginners

By Charlie Reese

What's The Big Deal About An Unlocked iPhone?

If you are trying to find any information about iPhones, sooner or later you will come across a term called "unlocked iPhones". This doesn't mean that iPhones have been released from their cage and are roaming the streets, attacking at will. All an unlocked iPhone means is that you are free to pick any phone network instead of the mandatory AT&T network all iPhones come with.

What's So Bad About AT&T?

Lots of people don't like AT&T for pretty much the same reasons they don't like a brand of soft drink or a certain pair of sneakers. People just are determined to have the things they want. If they have always had good service with a certain phone network, suddenly switching to AT&T for their iPhones can be quite a jolt. It's like traveling into completely alien territory.

Also, there have been a lot of complaints from the first wave of customers who bought the iPhone when it was released. They had a terrible time trying to get through to AT&T - which you need to do in order to get your fancy iPhone to work. For example, a reporter on CNet.com (a major geek hang-out on the web) had to wait about 40 hours for AT&T to activate his iPhone.

With service like this, no wonder many customers want unlocked iPhones. Because of a deal Apple made with AT&T, they can only make iPhones work for AT&T (making it "locked" into that phone network). Apple also announced that the security measures on the iPhone were rock-solid. And, if you wanted to travel to Europe, you were in big trouble.

Well, that was waving a red flag to a bull. Every geek and "Apple fanboy" in the world who could beg, borrow, steal (or BUY) an iPhone set about to hack into it. One of the main things they wanted to accomplish was an unlocked iPhone. The iPhone was released on June 29th. By mid-August, a young customer was able to make the world's first unlocked iPhone.

This Is Legal

Where there's a customer demand, there will be at least twenty companies that will cater to meeting that demand. The demand for unlocked iPhones was so great that many companies offered software to make unlocked iPhones, including iPhoneSIMfree.com. The secret to getting an unlocked iPhone is to reconfigure the SIM cared (the tiny chip that's about as big as your pinky nail). Then, you need to follow the rest of the software's instructions.

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