“The discrepancy between the number of iPhones assigned to carrier contracts and the number of iPhones shipped is enormous… a significant number of iPhones are being sold unattached to carrier plans. iPhones are being sold unlocked in the markets of Asia… and also being bought and unlocked in the US and Europe.

The message is that many and probably most iPhone buyers would like to be given a choice of carrier… ” reports ITWire.

When Greg Jozwiak, global marketing manager for the iPod was asked during MacWorld 2007 about Apple’s choice of making the iPhone exclusive to one carrier, he replied that it was the only way to ensure that features like visual voicemail will be delivered to users. But these “past few months [iPhone sales] has shown that quite a few consumers will be prepared to forgo carrier specific features and unlock their iPhones. But that’s also not a good outcome for Apple, which loses the lion’s share of its revenue and profits from its cut of carrier contracts in such cases.”

But will unlocking the iPhone release it to a larger market. Well, not when Apple has already burned so many bridges among wireless providers, Vodafone, the only major carrier without an iPhone contract in Europe, and China Mobile being cases in point. My opinion? Apple complicated its entry into the cell phone industry by changing the rules of the game. It’s on its own.
Via

AT&T’s EDGE network may be down in your area, so no high-speed mobile browsing for the time-being for iPhone users, unless you are Wi-Fi connected. We are not sure how many states are affected but St. Louis, Milwaukee, Denver and Chicago are definitely affected. Also reporting EDGE outage are parts of Montana, Ohio and Texas. Apparently, this is a huge chunk of the country having no EDGE connectivity on AT&T.

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