Smuggling iPhones back into China

ism tech

Posted Monday, 25 February 2008, 04:15 HST @552

From the New York Times, here’s a report about the booming gray market for iPhones in China. iPhones are manufactured in Taiwan, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apple doesn’t sell the iPhone in Taiwan or in Communist China because no Chinese telecom operator will meet Apple’s demands. So there’s not legal way to buy an iPhone in Taiwan or China.

No carrier? No support? No problem.

It’s relatively easy to unlock an iPhone and use it with on a GSM network. Third-party software is available to localize the screens and provide missing features. When Apple updates the iPhone’s firmware, these unlocks tend to break. This article from Business Week mentions that Prague is a major center for iPhone hacking.
But someone who is using an iPhone in China may not care that much about these new features. As more iPhones enter the gray market, more programmers join the effort to jailbreak the device.

This makes me wonder what might have happened if Apple sold unlocked GSM iPhones online and in its retail stores, and told AT&T, T-Mobile and every other GSM carrier in the world to just deal with it. The customer service problems might be significant, which explains why Apple has decided not to break the rules… yet.

I also wonder how many iPhones have been purchased in Honolulu and then shipped outside the United States.

Silicon Hutong predicted over a year ago that Apple would wait to introduce the iPhone in China. Looks like he was right!

See my earlier posts about the iPhone: