Wow! Can you say difficult? AT&T has a monopoly locked down on those things! I was warned about jail breaking my phone. If you do that you void your warranty, so can’t do that. Oh, but wait, your warranty is void if you leave the country so who cares! Now if you don’t know what I am talking about here it is. To use your iphone on a new cell network, outside the US, you have to both jailbreak it and then unlock the SIM card. Sounds very complicated, but after a little time surfing hacking sites on the net, I found it to be a simple process. Another expat here gave me the name of a guy who could do it all for me for $150RM. Not too expensive, but those who know who I married understand any money is a lot. Which is why I chose to try to figure it out myself. I am not terribly technologically advanced, but I can figure out the simple stuff. My biggest problem was finding a wifi spot that I could hook into to get the downloads complete. Tony and I spent some time over in the coffee shops doing that. Again not hard, unless you have two children who love to climb and jump on you when you are doing important hacking! It took me two weeks to get enough time online to get the phone ready for a SIM card over here. Another week after that to figure out what carrier to use and how to get a number. I had to decide whether I wanted pre-paid or post-paid and then what plan I needed. Unfortunately, the plan I want requires you to already have a number. So I have a number and in a month I will change my plan to include data as well as a telephone. I am back in this century, a little! I have a phone and I can text people, but I still can’t use my iphone completely until I have a data plan too. Can you see how complicated this has become? Moving internationally has so many different dynamics to think of and deal with. Dang I just wanted a freaking phone people!
Oh and just for the record, they don’t have the iphone 4 here yet. Should be later this month, but it will cost over $1000US. Again, you know who I married! I will be selling my services on jail breaking and unlocking for any expats in the future. My new business venture to help pay for my shopping trips.
Hey girl (it's Jen) - I love this post - just had to laugh as I had the same issue. Took me a week to learn that "Jail Break" and "Unlock" were two different things. Then I paid $27US for a program to let me do it myself (upgraded my system, upgraded iTunes, etc) then got to the actual Jailbreak part and had no service on my phone, so couldn't access Safari so couldn't do it. Total waste of money. Finally found someone in the city who could do it for me (downgraded system to 4.0.0) and only cost me $30. Then I signed up for my plan and couldn't access Safari for ages, but it finally just came on. Was trying to avoid calling Apple (which is what my carrier told me I needed to do to change some settings) as I figured they wouldn't help me since I'd unlocked the sucker! Was about to sell the thing to my sister and just get a new plan including the 4G, but I was too stubborn and KNEW I could get my 3G to work! And I'm not even in a third-world country!
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