Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Unlocking a Vodafone Australia iPhone

UnlockComplete.pngDon't get excited, this is the story of paying to do this. The bottom line is that it costs $75 if you do it online, plus whatever penalty there is to get out of your contract...

Vodafone's reception seems reasonable everywhere except at my home. As I've been home a lot recently I'm just fed up with walking around saying "can you hear me now?" or just getting an SMS saying that I have new voice mail. It was time to say farewell to Vodafone and I figured I churn over to Telstra.

You can go to a shop or ring them up, but they'll both simply tell you to go home and go here. You need the IMEI from Settings/General/About and a credit card good for $75.

The site shows all the instructions and it all went smoothly for me. Basically you plug your iPhone in to a machine with iTunes, still with the Vodafone SIM in it, and click Restore. iTunes will back it up, then download the latest software and after restoring show this:

Picture 2.png


I haven't received the bill from Vodafone punishing me for exercising my free market right of changing suppliers, but they tell me it will be $990. Surely this is a restraint of trade? I paid $200 up front for this phone so are iPhones really AU$1,200 retail?

IMG_0084.JPGI'm not impressed, but at least now I can receive phone calls at home reliably and own the unlocked phone outright to allow for future flexibility.

The iPhone is a great phone, there was another customer in the Telstra shop today who was trying to get his email to work on a Motorola phone, he'd been there for hours and no one could figure it out.

Kara at the Manly Telstra store is amazing, she was serving four customers simultaneously and none of us felt like we weren't getting attention.

One customer even had a pet rat on her shoulder.

Update on network coverage

I've just travelled from the Northern Beaches, by bus and train through to Central station, and the Telstra 3G network is clearly better for me than Vodafone's network. Aside from a couple of black spots deep in rail tunnels in the city coverage was excellent.

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