French iPhone buyers may choose Orange or unlocked

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Great Thanks and Regards To You.................

Strangely enough, Apple keeps thinking the dollar is worth the same as a euro. When are they going to stop doing that? If it is $399 in America, it should be €280 in Europe.

Bastards.

Sweet news for us in Asia - phones are rarely locked to carriers; I've no idea whether it's law or just the accepted way of doing things here in HK. Either way, the fact that an unlocked phone is being sold somewhere suggest that this is how they'll sell them here.

For those who can't wait, they are being sold unlocked in Mongkok cellphone malls for about US$500. Not sure which firmware version though.

Just to clarify things about the french law :
- the carrier HAS to sell an unlocked phone, but he can sell it at a higher price than the locked one.
- the carrier HAS to unlock a phone WHENEVER the client ask him, but can ask for money for that (currently less than 100€ for Orange).
- the carrier HAS to unlock a phone FOR FREE, as soon as the client has the phone for more than 6 month. It's the law and there's jurisprudence on this matter.

I have a few doubts on Apple's marketing strategy on iPhone:
Q1. Why Apple is selling iPhone in its store, which can not be used without unlocking - does this mean Apple is actually 'expecting' a large group of buyers to unblock iPhone?
Q2. Can apple make a large profit by only sharing the subscribers' monthly bills with AT&T? (I doubt so, which may answer to Q1.)
Q3. If all the iPhones were sold unlocked with no string attached, would the volume of iPhone purchases be many times more that it is now? and more profits??

@ mars

Many thanks for the clarification, I stand corrected and look forward to seeing how this pans out (price being the large unknown)

@Tones, the unlucking law in question 100% French, you are correct. There is nothing requiring Apple to offer unlocked phones in other E.U. member states.

The problem in question here is that selling a product, in this case an unlocked iPhone, in one E.U. member-state with a mechanism (software or otherwise) to prevent its use in other member states is quite illegal. It's all part of the European Unions free trade agreements.

@ 11 and 12

The unlocked Phone is French law, and not an EU law.

Whilst there is no doubt that the multi-itunes versions across the EU is currently under investigation, there is nothing that requires Apple to stop this *as yet*, and no legal ramifications currently exist, in my non-legal background opinion.

And it seems the price is going up and up....

399.00 EUR = 278.010 GBP

? If you don't have a Mac/PC then how can you activate it, believe it or not not everyone has one, they should offer instore activations for those that choose that route.

What everyone seems to be missing (as usual) is that a factory unlocked iPhone represents a genuine opportunity to take it apart, and find out how Apple does it - if anything, any of the Dev Teams should start work now on a method of completely cloning (baseband and all) an existing iPhone onto another.

All we'd need in the future then is getting a hold of one French iPhone (I'm even willing to purchase and provide that), cloning it, and replicating it onto existing US iPhones. This should then yield a legitimate unlocked iPhone.

Of course, it's my guess that Apple will have further locked down the firmware by then to combat such an effort.

The other peripheral benefit would be that the above aproach would result in ways to unbrick existing iBricks, simply as it would literally revirginize the iPhone. Kinda a neat way to remind the Dev Team to work on their unbrick solution ....

Either way, depending on how this is handled in France, it may eventually force AT&T's hand to also allow unlocking for customers, under certain conditions. All it takes is a precendent (and, again, Apple knew all of this fully well).