Mi Gita iPhonica

Never before had I paid money in a product and I couldn’t use it right away. True, Apple says you need a two-year contract to activate the phone, but you don’t just advertise a product as “revolutionary” and expect the billions of the world to sit idle and watch silently. I had to take a bite, yet after they took their $419 bite from my pocket, I was left with a candy bar that could only dial 911. Even then, and since I wasn’t even using it in the United States, it was a candy bar that had no taste!

I was two steps away from being able to use the iPhone. First, I needed to fake the activation, and second, unlock it so as to use it with a network other than AT&T’s. Browsing through the tubes of the Internet, I came across the horrors, the screams, and flat-out nightmares of people that had rendered their phones bricks while doing either of the steps. There were too many howling and begging for anyone to help them. Not adding any comfort, the guides that described the hacks repeatedly used the words “may” and “some,” in describing the outcome of one step or the probability of success of another.

Finding what you should is in itself not easy. To activate an “out-of-the-box” firmware 1.1.1 is a whole different process than activating a 1.1.2. And if you had bought an iPhone pre-loaded with firmware 1.0.2 and upgraded 1.1.1, it is another story altogether. Sometimes you have to upgrade, sometimes you have to downgrade, and of course, each movement along the firmware history has its own share of hacks. Shortly, it is a mess just to find what you should be doing, and you shouldn’t expect your grandma finding her way through this on her own!

Which I find extremely pathetic, not your grandmother’s lack of savviness, but that a phone touted by its creators to be the easiest to end up being that difficult to get to work.

After activating it, I was left with phone that can do a lot, except ironically, it couldn’t make or receive phone calls. It still was locked to AT&T, and the “hacking” community still didn’t figure out how to software-unlock Apple’s latest firmware, version 1.1.2. There were means to do a hardware unlock, but it cost money, more than one quarter of the phone’s price for a piece of circuitry that couldn’t have cost more than a dollar to assemble!

I patiently waited two weeks for a software unlock to surface, but then fed up with waiting and decided to go the hardware route. Software unlocks, although come at the price of nothing, require modifying the “baseband”, or the modem firmware, which basically means you’re messing what the phone’s internals, so hardware unlocks are kind of a safer bet. However, their price was not just the problem, but rather, where to buy them from. You won’t find them at Amazon.com, and in the meantime, you come across many before you that had been scammed over over these hardware unlocks. A few had most buyers pleased, and I settled on the only one of them that accepted a method of payment I could actually use from this fuggly lands of Egypt.

It is understandable when I go through hefty troubles to get to install Internet Explorer 7 on a non-genuine Windows XP installation; I didn’t pay Microsoft anything and they deserve to hassle me as much as they want or could. But when I pay Apple, and I pay them this much, and I go through all this hassle to get to use what I paid for, this I find extremely annoying!

Four days later my hardware unlock came in with the FedEx courier. It took me a few minutes to manage to fit it in the phone, but as soon as I did, voila, “Vodafone” the carrier read.

It doesn’t end here though. You see, there is a small problem with the iPhone when it receives calls in countries other than the United States, Canada and six others — it crashes! Apple, trying to annoy as many people as they could, did not spend the time to handle formatting phone numbers from any but the eight countries they were expecting to launch the iPhone into. When you get a call, and the “AppSupport” application fails to format that incoming number for display, it doesn’t just render the phone number as is, it crashes! There is a fix, but again, your grandma would have probably already had a heart attack by now if she was trying to do this on her own!

As Hollywood usually ends its films: “This is only the beginning”, for there are other problems that you would need to solve, let alone the fact that you wouldn’t be able to upgrade to the next firmware until someone figures out how to activate and unlock it.

I wish I could say I am now boycotting Apple and wouldn’t be buying any of their products, but damn, even their shit is tasty.

Posted January 14th, 2008. Filed under: Posts.