Outside US or Europe - Should you buy an iPhone?

If you aren’t in the ‘blessed’ countries where the iPhone is (or will be) officially released so far (US, UK, Germany and France), the only way you can have an iPhone that works is to (a) get one on the ‘gray’ market and then (b) unlock it with one of the various ‘hacks’ now available. So, with Apple now committing to a game of cat and mouse with the unlockers, is it still worth buying one?

Obviously, this is going to be a very personal decision, potentially involving an outlay of quite a bit of dosh for a very good-looking ‘brick’! Nevertheless, personally I am willing to take the risk. Let me tell you why.

A colleague of mine has just turned up with her new iPod Touch - essentially a slightly thinner iPhone with no phone functionality - and I must say the interface is simply breathtaking. There is no doubt that the form factor, feel, and general usability are a huge leap forward from anything I have used before. Clearly, all the hype is warranted - technolust rises up within in seconds… So if the iPhone is just like that with all the phone functionality as well, I can imagine there are many, many people who would be prepared to take quite a few ‘risks’ to get one - including me!

So, assuming (1) I could get access to one at a reasonable price (i.e. US$399) and not what some websites are offering them for here in New Zealand (US$900), (2) that I can easily unlock the phone for use on my current GSM providers network for free, and (3) I am prepared to NOT update the phone immediately when new firmware updates come out, what will I not get?

Apparently, a good number of things:

No visual voicemail (ok - no big deal)
No support from Apple is anything goes wrong (ok - risk no. 1)
No warranty (yep obvious - risk no. 2)
Quite a bit of missing functionality (e.g. no Sync’ing Todo Lists - not so good)
No 3G (sigh - but my current Treo 650 doesn’t have it either)
No removable battery (another sigh - but neither does my iPod and that has been fine)

Inspite of all this, it still seems worth it to me. And I’m sure I’m not alone. According to articles in The Press recently, orders for TurboSIM and unlocked iPhones are going crazy here. And, it may be years before we see an official release as Vodafone can’t seem to successfully negotiate a contract with Apple yet.

Since NZ is such a small market, I’m sure demand must be much bigger in larger markets like Australia or Canada. So is Apple really planning to aggressively shutdown such demand? Personally, I have my doubts… In fact, I would not be surprised if their firmware updates that disable previous unlocks will not be that hard to circumvent for that very reason… Remember, they want to sell 10 million phones in a year. Only time will tell I guess.

So, what about you? Are you ready to take the iPhone leap yet?

(See related article by Saul Hansell on a ‘Long iPhone War’ here. Also see statement by iPhone unlockers here.)

Update - It seems the new security Apple has added to firmware 1.11 for the iPhone are going to be harder to workaround than I thought. What is Steve Jobs really up to?

Originally from TechGripe! by Brett Ryland (28 September 2007).