November 2008 Archives
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I just want it because of the fancy pants charger.
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Tested and proven to be true.
As the great mobile phone debate raged on, I finally broke down and got ahold of an iPhone. I wanted to use an AT&T SIM card without getting a new AT&T account. The reasons for this are my own.
So I purchased this iPhone 3g, and I also got a hardware unlock. It worked perfectly.
And then version 2.2 was released today and, much to my dismay, I learned that these proxy-sims were no longer functional. So off I went on my merry little way of trying to decide what to do and how to do it. And I solved my problem.
Today I learned that each time you upgrade your firmware your iPhone gets reactivated. So I thought hey, didn't I upgrade to 2.1 with my SIM and the proxy-sim in place? Yeah, I think I did. Perhaps I somehow activated the phone with that SIM card instead. So I took out the proxy-sim and sure enough I had signal.
From there I went to google to try to find material to back this experience up and understand why it happened. That's when I found this. It seems that, very quietly, Apple changed the iPhone from being SIM locked to carrier locked starting at 2.0. Could it be true?
I tested with a friend's iPhone and my AT&T SIM and it turned out that it is indeed true.
This evening I upgraded my iPhone to 2.2 with my SIM, a SIM that was not used to activate the iPhone in the first place but is AT&T. It worked flawlessly.
Thus far the only thing I know is missing is visual voicemail, and frankly I can do without it.