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Unlocked iPhones a growing industry
A cottage industry has grown up surrounding unlocked iPhones, and two new companies are looking to cash in. Brazilian company DesbloqueioBr came up with a clever way of using a SIM-card adapter to enable unlocking the phone and choosing a carrier at your discretion. It's much like the Turbo SIM unlock. (There's video showing how this works at our sister site, Engadget.) It ain't cheap: according to this site, the company plans to charge as much as $375 for the hack. Trouble is, the call quality is apparently worse, and Apple can break your unlock with a software update. So, if you're not willing to drop that much for a hack, and you're into totally shady, fell-off-the-truck deals, then this is for you: You can order a "original" Apple devices direct from a dealer in Hong Kong. You do have to place a minimum order of $1,000, but everything you get will be network-unlocked. Who knows, though, if they'll get here.
Unlocking iPhone from AT&T gets easier, still a pain
So you say writing SIMs all by your lonesome isn't part of your daily routine, but you're still interested in freeing the iPhone from AT&T's surly bonds? Yeah, we can't blame you -- we're pretty much in the same boat -- so we're glad to see that an ever-so-slightly easier unlocking trick has bubbled out of the hive mind just a week after the original. This new hackery involves a specialized SIM card called a "Turbo SIM" manufactured by the Czech Republic's BLADOX. The idea behind the Turbo SIM is that you can add... well, stuff to the Turbo SIM, sandwich it between your regular SIM and your phone, and the loaded material then becomes available to the handset; traditionally, that "stuff" is value-add software like customized SMS directories, security, logging, and the like. In this case, though, the chip is used to pass through the original AT&T SIM's identifying information to the phone while preserving the calling capability of the Carrier X SIM of your choosing. Of course, a €59 (about $81) Turbo SIM has to be ordered from afar to get this accomplished, the phone has to be jailbreaked, and a handful of files need to be downloaded, edited, and executed, so this still isn't for the faint of heart. As always, buyer beware, and find a nice stack of paper that needs weightin' in case everything goes south in a hurry.[Via iPhone World]
