nanfeng oranges

I guess I wasn’t the first person to get an iPhone into China. The article claims one in ten iPhone shipments go to China. People are cashing in by buying, unlocking, and reselling the phones.

So what do people in China know about Apple and the iPhone? At the Baiyun Airport in Guangzhou, my iPhone set off the metal detector. The security guard saw it and launched into a conversation with his colleagues about Apple. They concluded that Apple has nice computers and phones, but what they’re really known for is mp3 players (iPods). (iPod ads are everywhere in Guangzhou.)

You can easily find Apple resellers in Guangzhou (and I assume Beijing), and soon (ahead of the Olympics) there will be an Apple store in Beijing. But, the only Apple computers I’ve seen in the wild in China have belonged to foreigners.

How hard is it to use an iPhone in China? Not terribly diffiult. Before I explain how to hack it, a quick intro into how it’s supposed to be used.

If you play by the rules, you purchase your iPhone through a legitimate channel (a store or online), take it home, and plug it into your computer. You get a message that the phone needs to be activated through AT&T. You follow the instructions, sign up for a service plan with AT&T and your phone can be used.

Now, what if you don’t play by the rules? There are three things you have to do: activate, jailbreak, and unlock. Several months ago, this is how you’d do it.

(As a sidenote, this will not work any more. A couple rounds in the match between Apple and the hackers have been completed in the time since I unlocked my phone and Apple has fixed the loopholes exploited here.)

You buy your phone and take it home where you have a wi-fi internet connection. You turn it on and see that it doesn’t want you to do anything but activate it through AT&T or call 911.

You don’t worry. You punch in some magical numbers and suddenly have access to the contact manager. Now, if you know what you’re doing (or have a friend who does) you know that the contact manager gives you access to the system preferences. And the system preferences lets you set up your wi-fi connection.

Pretty soon your iPhone is connected to the internet (but not activated or jailbroken yet). With another simple contact manager hack, you open a web browser and visit a site called jailbreakme.com. Magically, your phone is activated and jailbroken and your phone has a new program that allows you to add and remove programs.

You use this program to install a little piece of software called anySIM that unlocks your phone. You execute this program. It gives you some dire warnings but you proceed anyways. A few minutes later, your phone has been unlocked and can be used with any sim card.

That was the state of the phone we took to China. What happened when we popped in a China Unicom sim card? The phone worked without issue.

One of the big problems with the iPhone is that it lacks a Chinese input method. But, hardworking Chinese hackers have addressed this problem with a little piece of software called iCosta. Problem solved.

The iPhone will likely be legitimately available in Japan long before it is available in China. But Japan has its own obstacles for Apple to overcome (outlined in a recent edition of Newsweek). The longer Apple waits to introduce the phone, the more competition it faces from new smartphones. And the longer it waits, the more people get locked into other contracts. Also, Apple’s own Touch iPod already available in Japan might eat away at their market for the iPhone. Finally, Japan’s mobile network is something of a mess.

So far I have not heard any rumors about when the iPhone will be available in Mongolia.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 16th, 2008 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Blogosphere. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.