Traveling abroad with the iPhone

[brikis98]

I'm considering getting the new iPhone 3GS on AT&T but just remembered that I typically take 1-2 trips to Europe per year. It would be awesome to take the iPhone with me on these trips to have access to Google maps, find good restaurants, etc, but I'm not sure how global roaming works.

Have any of you traveled abroad with your iPhones? If so, some questions:

1. Do you get charged an arm and a leg for incoming/outgoing calls outside of the US? What about using the data plan outside the US? Can you pre-pay for some international phone/data roaming plan to make it more affordable?
2. When I had a Blackberry a while ago, I called AT&T, told them I'd be traveling, and they gave me the code to unlock it. I was then able to buy an international SIM card that made calls much more affordable. I'm guessing AT&T will not willingly unlock the iPhone, so is jailbreaking it the only way to use it with an international sim card?

 

[gorcorps]

So far there's no jailbreak and unlock for the 3GS yet (that I know of). Not sure about ATT being able to unlock but I know that it's not a possibility for the user to do it. You can do all that w/ the 3G though which still does everything you mentioned.

 

[pm]

I'm using my original iPhone in Europe right now. It's normally on T-Mobile back in the US. It works fine over here - faster than in the US, actually. And it's definitely nice having access to Google Maps, Email and everything else that an iPhone has. Just updating Facebook with the Facebook app is pretty cool.

I haven't tried taking an iPhone over here on a trip and using AT&T's international service, but I have used T-Mobile in the past for cell service over here with a Nokia and it was expensive. I vastly prefer to just use Prepaid SIMs over here (US$6 for 50MB beats anything I'll get from a US carrier roaming over here).

AT&T say that they will unlock iPhones after you have owned them for two years. So presumably they are unlocking original iPhone customers who bought theirs back in June of 2007 now.

The current status on iPhones is that the original ones are really easy to unlock (thanks to the hackers that create the unlocking programs). Download a program called "redsn0w" and follow the prompts.

The iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G S are not unlockable yet. There was an unlock for the iPhone 3G running on the older 2.0 firmware back around Christmas, but since then there hasn't been a reliable unlock. There is talk of a iPhone 3G unlock coming soon and the initial rumors on the iPhone 3G S make it sound like the unlock might work on the 3G S too.

So... if you want an iPhone for travelling in Europe, then your best bet is to get an original iPhone from Ebay. A 3G iPhone will likely have an unlock soon - called "ultrasn0w". If you opt for a 3G S, it's not clear when an unlock will be available.

 

[brikis98]

What about iPhones sold outside of the US? Are any of those unlocked - or rather, never locked by Apple in the first place? If so, maybe it makes sense to pick up an iPhone 3GS from ebay (or similar) that's already (legally?) unlocked - at least once the prices come down.

 

[pm]

You can buy an iPhone abroad unlocked and it will work fine in the states. Once it's officially unlocked, it's unlocked forever.

There's a list here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1937

I'm presently in Poland. The two carriers that carry the iPhone here are Era and Orange. I I went to an official Orange store in a large city (Bialwystok) and they didn't have any iPhones in the store and didn't seem particularly keen to sell me one. At Era, they seemed more interested, but still didn't seem thrilled that I wanted one without a contract. Without a contract, unlocked, the price for a 16GB iPhone 3G appears to be 2500 Polish Zloty after tax. That's USD$763. My Polish is decent, but I didn't get everything that they said and I'm not sure that they understood everything that I said. I talked to the guys at the Era store and they sell it locked, but will unlock it upon request. Again, I think. His English was not very good - and my Polish was better, but still not up to the standards needed to have a detailed conversation about iPhones. I also got the impression that they didn't know much about them - I gather that they are not particularly popular in Poland. The salesman seemed to like the HTC Magic - which is the touchscreen follow-on to the T-Mobile G1 - a lot more. They didn't know much of anything about the iPhone 3G S. They said they didn't know the price and didn't know availability but recommended that I go to the store in Warsaw.

So tomorrow I'll be in Munich, Germany. They don't sell unlocked iPhones. On Thursday and through the weekend, I'll be in Austria and I'll see if I can't talk to the guys at Orange in Salzburg and will see if they know more than the Polish Orange guys in Bialwystok. I hope the guys in Salzburg speak English though because my German is only tourist-grade. My wife speaks German ok though... we'll see. Looking at the Orange.At webpage, it looks like the 8GB iPhone 3G is EUD$430 (USD$602), the 16GB iPhone 3GS is 510 Euros (USD$712) and a black 32GB iPhone 3GS is 609 Euros (a cool USD$852). But those are with the most basic plan - they do include taxes though. I'd assume that if I could buy one without a plan, it would be even more. I'm not sure they'll sell it planless though. And their website says they'll sell the 3GS in July... by which time I'll be back in the US.

Regardless, all of these prices are out of my pocketbook range. I'd pay $500, but not $700 or more.

I think I'll wait until I'm back in the US in July and I'll pick up a 16GB iPhone 3G from Craigslist or Ebay for roughly $350-400 (seems like current prices), and then unlock it with Ultrasn0w in preparation for my next trip over here later this year - and we'll be in the UK and Ireland for 2-3 months next summer, and wait for the 3GS to approach a price that I'm willing to pay. And I'll keep my eye on the Android phones... like the Samsung i7500. Maybe the Polish Era guy has a point.

 

[brikis98]

Originally posted by: pm
You can buy an iPhone abroad unlocked and it will work fine in the states. Once it's officially unlocked, it's unlocked forever.

There's a list here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1937

I'm presently in Poland. The two carriers that carry the iPhone here are Era and Orange. I I went to an official Orange store in a large city (Bialwystok) and they didn't have any iPhones in the store and didn't seem particularly keen to sell me one. At Era, they seemed more interested, but still didn't seem thrilled that I wanted one without a contract. Without a contract, unlocked, the price for a 16GB iPhone 3G appears to be 2500 Polish Zloty after tax. That's USD$763. My Polish is decent, but I didn't get everything that they said and I'm not sure that they understood everything that I said. I talked to the guys at the Era store and they sell it locked, but will unlock it upon request. Again, I think. His English was not very good - and my Polish was better, but still not up to the standards needed to have a detailed conversation about iPhones. I also got the impression that they didn't know much about them - I gather that they are not particularly popular in Poland. The salesman seemed to like the HTC Magic - which is the touchscreen follow-on to the T-Mobile G1 - a lot more. They didn't know much of anything about the iPhone 3G S. They said they didn't know the price and didn't know availability but recommended that I go to the store in Warsaw.

So tomorrow I'll be in Munich, Germany. They don't sell unlocked iPhones. On Thursday and through the weekend, I'll be in Austria and I'll see if I can't talk to the guys at Orange in Salzburg and will see if they know more than the Polish Orange guys in Bialwystok. I hope the guys in Salzburg speak English though because my German is only tourist-grade. My wife speaks German ok though... we'll see. Looking at the Orange.At webpage, it looks like the 8GB iPhone 3G is EUD$430 (USD$602), the 16GB iPhone 3GS is 510 Euros (USD$712) and a black 32GB iPhone 3GS is 609 Euros (a cool USD$852). But those are with the most basic plan - they do include taxes though. I'd assume that if I could buy one without a plan, it would be even more. I'm not sure they'll sell it planless though. And their website says they'll sell the 3GS in July... by which time I'll be back in the US.

Regardless, all of these prices are out of my pocketbook range. I'd pay $500, but not $700 or more.

I think I'll wait until I'm back in the US in July and I'll pick up a 16GB iPhone 3G from Craigslist or Ebay for roughly $350-400 (seems like current prices), and then unlock it with Ultrasn0w in preparation for my next trip over here later this year - and we'll be in the UK and Ireland for 2-3 months next summer, and wait for the 3GS to approach a price that I'm willing to pay. And I'll keep my eye on the Android phones... like the Samsung i7500. Maybe the Polish Era guy has a point.

I'd want to get the phone now, while I'm still in the US, but I can't find a (legitimate looking) unlocked 3GS for sale online. I heard buy.com had them briefly, but they all sold out. ebay has a bunch, but I'm doubtful of their unlocked claims. However, if I could find one and could use it with any network, I'd pay up to $650 for it.


Edit --> looks like buy.com was selling unlocked versions of the iPhone 3G, not the 3GS.

 

[brikis98]

Ok, I found a couple sites taking pre-orders for the unlocked iPhone 3GS but they are obscenely expensive: here and here. Sigh.

Out of curiosity, if the iPhone Dev Team finds a way to unlock the 3GS, will there be any difference between that and a factory unlocked 3GS?

 

[pm]

Yeah, assuming the iPhone dev team can unlock the 3GS, the big difference will be that the dev team's unlock won't survive a baseband update. Well, not unless they figure out the encryption/cipher on the the way that the unlock codes are set up per iPhone. It's been a while since I looked at the problem, but as I understand it there's a unique code per iPhone and you need to put that code into some register somewhere and then the phone checks it on boot-up. Something like that. What the iPhone Dev team seems to do - again, I'm no expert - is to check the way that the code that does the checking works. So rather than figure out the code, they just change the routine that checks it... or something like that.

The problem with their approach is that it needs to be redone each time that Apple updates the firmware for the communication processor (called the baseband) and overwrites the code they changed.

A legally unlocked phone should be unlocked forever no matter what firmware upgrade it gets.

[Edit] I was Googling around to try to read up on how the unlocking code works, and I came across the Blog of George Hotz aka geohotz. Geohotz - the guy who originally unlocked the first iPhone (and sold it on Ebay for a car and three other (locked) iPhones ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz )- seems to have figured out a way to break the chain of trust for iBoot on the new 3GS ( http://iphonejtag.blogspot.com...no-sn0w-in-summer.html ). That should lead to an unlocked 3GS soon, I would think, since the baseband on the 3GS is the same as the 3G and they have Ultrasn0w unlocking the 3.0 baseband on the 3G. If they have an iBoot exploit - geez that was fast - they should be able to use the Ultrasn0w unlock with it.

 

[brikis98]

Are the procedures the iPhone Dev team uses to unlock the phone generally reversible? I'd only need it unlocked during my trips abroad, so if I could unlock it right before the trip, use it abroad and then reverse the procedure (going back to AT&T), I wouldn't have to worry about updates failing...

 

[pm]

So, the answer is yes and no or else "it depends". They are usually reversible, but not always.

To prevent hackers, Apple usually doesn't allow you to downgrade the firmware on the phone - so you can't go backwards in time. If you are the 3.0 firmware, you can't revert back to 2.0. Most of the time anwyay - usually the hackers figure out some tricky way to do it.

So what you need to do to undo an unlock is either hope that the unlockers have an undo function on their hack - which they often do - or reflash the baseband with a version that overwrites the change but not all of them do. The baseband isn't updated very often, so the latter isn't a great solution. And not all the hacks have an undo on them, so that's not a great solution either. So, back to "it depends".


To be honest, though, if I was thinking about buying an iPhone from AT&T and I was planning on travelling to Europe, I would do what you are proposing. Hack it for the trip and undo the hack somehow when I'm done.

 

[brikis98]

Well... looks like I got some thinking to do. Thanks for the help