[mickyd67]

I believe France and Hong Kong sells iPhones which are factory unlocked?

If you buy a phone from either location would it simply be a case of activating on iTunes with any SIM and you're free to do what you like?

Anyone done this? Are the costs to buy & ship high?

[chainy]

Originally Posted by mickyd67

I believe France and Hong Kong sells iPhones which are factory unlocked?

If you buy a phone from either location would it simply be a case of activating on iTunes with any SIM and you're free to do what you like?

Anyone done this? Are the costs to buy & ship high?

I got mine from the Classified forum on here. It was a brand new phone bought in person from the seller in Italy. It automatically unlocked when I connected it to my PC via Itunes. It cost me £650 (Just over 700 euroes I think)

Hope this is of some help.

[niall@inkything]

£700 on Play.com, including delivery.

[Dolphine]

Hong Kong and Australia also sell it officially SIM unlocked. About £20/40 cheaper than buying the PAYG model from 02.

If you buy an official SIM unlocked phone - yes you simply connect it to iTunes and then itunes sends the unique identifier for your phone to their servers and once it is recognised - its officially unlocked. It really is as simple as that. You cannot do anything to the phone until it verifies with Apple HQ.

There are a couple of verfied sellers on the UK ebay site who surprise surprise are selling from Australia and Hong Kong. There is one HK seller and even though he has a bidding price, he also gives you the option of giving him an offer - so you have nothing to lose. At his buy price, he gets a good £100 extra from just walking into the Apple store and picking one up. I'm sure if u gave him an offer of say £50 - he would probably go for it. Shipping is like £10-20. In the end it would be the same as the PAYG model here or even more, but the advantage is you have an officially unlocked phone so you can keep updating your firmware and never get locked out.

[YO YO]

i have a 3gs from austraila got it from ebay uk and collected it from someone in derby

my bird got a 16 gb 3g one from ebay austraila and ended up paying £47.21 inport tax

saves messing about with jailbreaking and you can update it straight the way

[funkyspider]

Apparenly O2 will be unlocking iPhones when other carriers begin selling them in a month or so. There is a thread on here if you do a search. Would be worth it before shopping abroad.

[Professor Chaos]

What exactly is the big advantGe of an official unlocked iPhone? You still have to jailbreak it to get any real good use out of it