Hey Seaj. I see the iPhone 4 is still on the cards for you. Here's my 2cents... Assuming you start off with a network-locked iPhone 4, then I know of the following options to get it unlocked:
1.) Get it unlocked from the carrier itself, which depends on the carrier. For example, I've come across these possibilities in my home town:
- if you fulfill the length of the contract then some carriers will allow the phone to be unlocked with a phone call to their support;
- some carriers will force you to pay a nominal fee regardless; and
- a rare few will just give it to you free if you state you are going overseas and need the phone unlocked so it can be used with a foreign SIM.
NB: YMMV depending on the country and the carrier that the iPhone came from. There might be some carriers that never offer any form of phone unlocking service (that I'm yet to be aware of).
2.) Jailbreaking the iPhone will allow a certain amount of modification/hacking to be done to the phone, of which will usually mean the ability to unlock the phone from the original network. This is why jailbreaking can become confused with an unlocked phone. Now the success of the unlocking via jailbreaking is not always 100% (well based on my past readings), but I suspect these days it has gotten to the point where it is above 90%. The process would probably be simple enough for some, but for those less technically inclined you may want to "call a friend" who is more skilled in this area.
Note: AFAIK any other method of unlocking the iPhone from the carrier are purely lies. So don't believe the scam websites that claim to be able to do it. If you're curious about such scam websites, please look here:
http://www.scam.com/showthread.php?t=127773 (and observe how the scammers jump onto the forum to pretend to give people false hope by saying it actually does work - they will typically only have 1 post against their name). If you do a Google search, you'll soon realise that these websites even have their own faked review/testimonial websites to make their scam seem legit. Don't trust them!
Another note (not quite related to unlocking, but still relevant to travelling with the phone): The iPhone 4 was released in two models: a GSM and later CDMA (see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4). Take care that you get the right model for use with your intended network, since GSM is a totally different to CDMA. However, the newest iPhone 4
S apparently has compatibility with both GSM and CDMA types of networks built-in (see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4S) and thus is being touted as the "truly international world phone" (
http://www.macworld.com/article/ ... s_world_phone_.html).
*edit* fixed URLs
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Last edited by yyy111 at 16-2-2012 17:27 ]
