China Unicom offering in-store jailbreaking

LOL, walk in, buy an iPhone, get it jailbroken, walk out with an iPhone with a voided warranty.

If you need to return your phone because of a problem, they'd probably tell you "Sorry, but it's jailbroken".

Smart.

yeah, this isn't news. apple resellers in China will install just about any mac app for you, jailbreak and fill iPads and iPhones with apps all for free. It really isn't a big deal to them. Of course to the rest of us it should be a huge deal- people say that China is a poor country and so the same rules don't apply. That is complete rot, anyone who can afford any apple product should pay for what they use on it.

If you read the comments in the thread, you see many questioning if this is a real China Unicom store or just a handphone seller. I doubt this is a real Unicom store as they are also selling iPads most likely imported from HK. iPad is not officially available in China yet.

China is the only free country in the world.

This is pretty typical in any Chinese cell-phone store. There is no way they could get business without these kinds of services. Further, it's expected with any phone purchased to have these kinds of 'liberating' hacks applied.

For a very long time there did not exist OSes/Firmwares that supported a Chinese market, but the people still wanted Nintendos/XBoxes/Nokias/Macbooks, etc. So with the hardware came a service to flash it with custom firmware. A side effect was that it now was easy to install a SD card with 500 of the most-played games onto the Nintendo along with the firmware hack - for only a few dollars more.

It's still uncommon for an international hardware company to take note, much less cater to the Chinese market - and as such these hacks are still very commonplace.

I had a friend ran jailbreak on his iphone inside the apple store before leaving after he picked up a 3gs a few weeks ago...he said he was doing it in the store so he could 'stick it to the man'...I jailbroke my iPhone 4 but may go back just because the locked system seems more stable. I get random freezes and stuff on my iphone 4 and really want/need stability for work...however some of the gesture stuff I use with Activator has made me wait on un-Jailbreaking.

That has got to be the dumbest move I have ever seen a company make, they're out of business with Apple before they even had a chance to say hello xD

And a billion more users will stop paying for iOS apps. Bummer.

Read title as "Chinese Unicorn"... was definitely disappointed. :