An iPhone I’d Buy

My friends Jeff Pulver and Fred Wilson both say they’d buy an iPhone if they could find one that was unlocked meaning that they could put a SIM card in it and use it with networks other than at&t (nee Cingular).  The phone comes locked to that network but it’s a pretty good bet someone’ll find a way to unlock it pretty soon.

Wired said Jeff was one of the only two iPhone refuseniks in the world but they must’ve missed Fred and me.  Fred is even offering ad space on his blog for someone who comes up with a legit unlocked iPhone.  By legit, Fred DOESN’T mean that either Apple or at&t have to approve of it, only that it works.  Fred’s blog would be a great place to have an ad for that product since it is currently the first link to come up if you google “unlocked iPhone.”

I have less to offer an inventor than Fred but I want more.  I want an iPhone whose voice capabilities can be used at WiFi hotspots so that I can make VoIP calls rather than cellular ones, particularly when roaming out of the country.  I would only buy such a phone if it is capable of signing on to any hotspot that I can sign onto with a PC.

If you’re the first to show me a phone like that and it works (you gotta let me test it but I’ll either give it back or buy it), I’ll blog about your product AND give you a free ad on Fractals of Change for thirty days.  Not as good as being on Fred’s blog but you never can tell what interesting links we might get.

It will be difficult to win this challenge because Apple is rumored to have carefully locked certain capabilities to prevent VoIP from working at the behest of at&t, who would rather charge for wireless calls and sign you up for years thank you very much.  But, if you’re a great hacker,….  There would be a great irony in this given Steve Job’s early relationship with the notorious Captain Crunch who invented the blue box which used musical tones to hack into the telephone network of the day for the purpose of making free long distance calls.

Unfortunately, although Apple may have revolutionized the form factor of handsets with the iPhone, it chose not to challenge the locked business model of wireless carriers.  Perhaps by responding to Fred’s challenge or mine, you can make the iPhone the revolutionary tool it could be.

Comments

[Jacob Ner-David]

Tom,
while I appreciate your frustration, I think you are headed in slightly short-sighted direction. What about one SIM, that has multiple profiles burnt into it, so that when you arrive in the UK, it signs on to BT Cellnet, in the US AT&T, in Israel Orange, etc. Now, this will only work if you burnt the profiles in advance, but for the countries you plan on visiting will work quite well. I know of a star-up doing this...interesting "niche" for frequent travelers to multiple countries. Can have your one phone number ring through, and have local numbers in each country. The WiFi direction is limiting, because I do not believe in the near term there will be enough open WiFi networks to give you convenient access for making a phone call. And the hand-offs between networks (remember, these are mobile phone calls) is not what they claim it is...Bottom line, I hate the top down models of the cellular network operators as much as the next geek, but you got to give them credit for creating the infrastructure. All the best, Jacob

[Zed]

Why bother with an underfeatured and crippled iPhone? Just get any unlocked, off the shelf Nokia E-series with integrated SIP client. VoIP, WLAN and any SIM card you choose.

[Aswath]

Another option is to ignore iPhone altogether and adopt an open phone like OpenMoko (openmoko.com). But then they have been a disappointment so far because (at least for me) they over promised and are planning to under deliver and the real product may be more expensive than what they claimed when they grabbed my attention.

[Bruce]

The limitations on this version of the iPhone are clear, but don't appear to be as bad as first thought: a lot of the functionality apparently works even without a SIM card (although, not voice).

However, my impression is that Jobs has a longer-term strategy than simply version 1.0. By agreeing to some of these limitations, Apple got the iPhone into the market with enormous support from AT&T (both marketing and, apparently, financial).

However, what AT&T missed is that they can only control what goes into the first version of the iPhone. If it is as successful as it appears to be (and the reviews all agree it works better than most of us thought), AT&T has just lost whatever leverage it had. When Apple brings out a new version (maybe not the next one if it is in the next 12 months, but certainly by 2009), AT&T will have to carry it -- as will every other carrier as AT&T's exclusivity expires.

At that point, Apple can put any application it wants on the device. Given that Apple has no reason to protect the business models of the wireless carriers, expect to find VoIP and other apps fully enabled. (To some degree, RIM already gets away with this by offering carrier-independent applications, but has less incentive to challenge the carrier model.)

[chrisco]

you can buy that wifi phone... see today's NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/05/technology/circuits/05pogue.html?8dpc
cheers, chrisco

[Ronald Pottol]

T-Mobile now has seamless wifi roaming cell phones, you get an optimized WiFi router (free with $50 mail in rebate) but they should work with almost hotspot. Not perfect yet, and the phones are kind of lame (well, the Nokia is, I mean, a VGA camera phone?), the other is not reviewed (as far as I can tell, only the Nokia has been seen by anyone), but looks better on paper.