Unlocked German iPhone not working

hello

got a "solution" from apple germany for this problem:

wait for may next year and use it now as ipod

i heared this today and it is true.

...

Dear all, isn't this sweet. I went through a lot of trouble to get an offially unlocked iPhone from France to Amsterdam - costing me €749 and then some for shipping it !

I have the same problems as the aTallMacUser;

I can't call the phone (the hourglass just runs and then the phone jumps out to screensaver)
I can't open the SMS app at all ⚠
I can't open last-calls list
I can't dial phone numbers in the dial-app.

What a shame... we are the well behaved, maybe slightly coward, crowd waiting for the official iPhone, and then things don't work. I love the machine, if only for mail, but it should all work !

I will try Vodafone NL. See if they have a newer SIM card, but please keep us posted with good news.

Have a good one,
Robert.

this is not the problem of the card

i tried 5 different card, one was the newest version which is avalible.

its a bug or it is on purpose - they don´t tell me

nothing new for us, but a quite good explanation, why we have the problems:
http://www.i-welt.de/2007/11/27/iphone-ein-bischen-unlocked/#more-1645

best regards
Christian

There is a site somewhere online, where they have posted an extract from a file on the iphone. This file contains the country code, international dialing prefix, area codes etc... unique to that country. The ONLY countries that appear in this are: America, Germany, UK, France (countries where the iphone is currently sold, and Canada, Italy, China and Japan. These are the only countries that the iphone will accept an sim card from! As far as I know these countries were built into the firmware of the iphone by apple and therefore it was apple who decide the countries to support. Other countries will be added as the iphone becomes available in these countries.

The only way to get it operational at the moment is to apply a patch, thereby voiding your warranty (not advisable).

Apple never intended to make the iphone available in Germany unlocked, but was forced to. In France you can buy an unlocked iphone, but according to reports, need an itunes France account to activate it (i.e. a French Credit card) thereby indicating that you are a French citizen.

Maybe apples hand has now been forced and will add other countries in the FW update, but when that becomes available is open to debate (suggestions suggest Saturday, but these are only rumors)

In mine view it is clear that apple decided not to support other countries in the 1.1.2 release, because they were not marketing or selling the iphone to these yet.

hi christian,
nachdem es eigentlich nur deutsch sprechende betrifft mach' ich x:
zitat:
Nur hacken hilft
Wer nun sein 999-Euro-iPhone wie ein normales GSM-Telefon nutzen will und ins Ausland reist, hier Prepaid-Karten nutzt, der muss sein iPhone hacken. Genau die von Apple als Hacker bezeichneten und Geschmähten Dev Teams und aktive Nutzer im Forum von Hackint0sh haben nicht nur das Problem erkannt und herausgefunden, sondern auch Lösungen dafür. Statt eines Katz-und-Maus-Spiels hätte Apple vielleicht hier einmal nicht auf seine selbsternannten Spezialisten in den USA, sondern auf die “Hacker” hören, sich bei ihnen bedanken und entsprechend nachbessern sollen. (auszug aus i-welt.de)

ergo, absolute sauerei von a...e !

Absolutely right. I have hacked my phone and I have no bad feeling about that, altough I would like to have a non hacked one.
I my opinion I have bought a officially unlocked phone, therefore I have a right on it`s proper function. I am not using anything what I have not paid for.
When 29€ phones can do, what a 999€ phone can`t do, then I think this is very sad.

Nevertheless I undestand, that a solution from Apple cannot be as fast as a hack, as they have to follow standards like not just developing but also testing and documentation.
Hope, that the 1.13. firmware is on the horizont and will adress this problems.

Best regards
Christian

PS: regarding loosing Warranty: I am quite sure, that the phone will not explode or breaking because of this hack!

Message was edited by: Christian Boehm

I'm sure it won't explode or break as a result!

I never considered if a restore of FW would remove the hack! It possibly will because the vast majority of sites claim the hack has to be re-applied after an update or restore 🙂

Even if you purchased a $399.00 iphone, you are paying for the device! It is yours to do with as you want. You might not even want to turn it on, but rather purchase a piece of history and keep as an investment (It might be worth a few bob in time to come)

I don't agree however that Apple cannot be as fast as a hack. Yes there is some testing, but if the hacker had a solution in a matter of days, you have to assume that apple could have had it within the same time period, and with their resources could have followed protocol also.... If they can release updates for Systems and softwares within hours of major bugs being identified, then they could do the same for the iphone. Maybe it's just me, but I think they had the solution within their gift since before the 1.1.2 FW was released! I think it was a conscious decision not to provide the support.

Glad to hear you have your iphone operating. I very nearly purchased one in Germany, but wanted to see how it played out. I wasn't prepared to hack it, so I'll wait till the official unit comes my-way (I'll be waiting a while so!)

Message was edited by: Keith Vaugh

Clearly, the hack will disappear, when the FW is restored. That is ok for me.
I was just a little bit sarcastic about fears to loose warranty.
What could happen, is, that there are some new software issues caused by using a hack. But in this case this cannot be as severe as the initial problem. What has the warranty helped me the last two weeks, hearing from people, who are sent back and forth between t-mobile and apple?

Regarding speed of an solution: sure, a big company can release a bugfix within hours, that's a matter of priorities and severity. I was working for one of the biggest companies of this world and have a lot of insights to product development and releasing new SW Versions.
IF the phone would tend to explode, when switching to the SMS Application, then there would be a fix within some hours, but otherwise 2 to 3 weeks in our case seems to be not acceptable from a customer point of view, but quite normal in industry.

Very valid points, and to be honest, never considered the "bug" or "conscious choice" in this light.

Interested to hear you have some insights in Product Development, I am actually doing some research in this area at the moment and maybe we could sit down in cyberspace over a cyber coffee in the future in the hope that you could share some of your insights.

I guess I will be in the same situation as all the guys out here.

I bought a french phone last week, and unlocked it yesterday, so I'm waiting for the iTunes database to be up to date to unlock my phone.

As I saw on french forums other people having troubles like this with french phone I expect the same.

I want to wait for a firmware update, altough this aint pleasant carrying around my old samsung and my iPhone aka "noble iPod Touch".

In case I do a hack to make sms/phone app working and there comes a solution to this program in the next firmware upgrade, will I be able to restore my phone back to it's UNhacked position???

As it was my plan from the start to own a legally unlocked phone.

tnx

My understanding is yes, but I don't know for sure. If the restore wipes everything from the Flash drive aka formats it, and then the restore reinstalls the OS and everything else, then I assume it is back to out of box state!

Can some one confirm this thinking?

if this is true it could be an acceptable temporary solution.

It wipes the OS, yes, but not the modified baseband of the phone. Its modifying this baseband that allows the phone to be used with other SIMs.

A simple restore WILL NOT relock the phone.

I'm not talking about unlocking it. I'm not interested in unlocking my phone since it is already legally unlocked trough iTunes by Orange F (I bought it in France).

I'm just talking about a hack that resolves - as earlier mentioned in this thread - the problem that causes the sms and phone app to crash.

You can't sim unlock an out of the box 1.1.2 european phone (yet)
but applying any hack to resolve the sms/phone app problem would involve jailbreaking to install the 3th party hack...