The factory/carrier unlock means that they have access to the whitelist, or access to getting the imei on your phone onto the whitelist. What happens is that, when the imei is added to the whitelist, the next time you sync your phone with iTunes, it will pop up a message that states that your phone has been unlocked. If a store is claiming that they can do it for $90 bux, its very possible they can get the imei onto the whitelist by contacting or accessing the whitelist servers. A few months back there were a whole bunch of websites advertising that they could do this, with varying degrees of success. The thing is, you don't need contacts at every carrier to do this, you just need to be able to have Apple add the imei. Carriers that unlock the iphone when the contract is complete, often just email Apple the imei and request that it be added to the whitelist. Any carrier that carries the iPhone can do this.
Restoring a jailbroken iphone back to stock is simple - all you do is do a restore from iTunes. A downside (or may not occur, depending on who you talk to) to jailbreaking is that the phone may not be as stable as time goes on after the initial jailbreak. There have been reports of the phone slowing down months and months after a jailbreak or applications suddenly quitting on their own, again months and months down the line. However, by that time, most people have usually moved on to the next version of the software, and thus, re-jailbroken their phone. Another downside is that software "may" not function properly on a jailbroken phone. One well know example was the iBooks application not launching at all, or a certain book not launching after a phone was jailbroken. The majority of applications, especially games, aren't prone to this kind of thing, however, some more obscure applications may see this happen. I did see this happen to some apps that were not created in North America, but all in all, its a rare occurrence. On other downside is that each time iOS is updated, you need to wait until a jailbreak is available before you upgrade your phone. Granted, jailbreaking the iphone these days is much much much easier than when I first got the 2g iPhone, but for a lot of people, jailbreaking again after an OS release is pain in the butt for them, mostly because they got someone else to do it.
I no longer jailbreak my iPhone, though I do jailbreak my other i-devices. I spent the money to get a factory unlocked version, and justified the price in the amount of time saved from having to jailbreak it each time an OS release comes. Since I don't have many apps on my phone, and lets face it, at $1 an app in most cases, I can afford to buy the app if I really like it. I'll just test it out on my other jailbroken i-devices and make a decision there. Its up to you if you really want to jailbreak your phone. The big reason is customization of the interface of the OS - beyond just changing the background. A lot of extra functionality, such as HDMI out on the ipad dongle, or an advanced file explorer, is now something you pay for on Cydia, so you have to weigh what you want to do with the phone. It's certainly not hard to do, if you're motivated to do it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by djm
(Post 8013415)
It looks like the iphone has to be jailbroken before software unlocking can happen (crystal mall).
Some questions: - One store claims they can do a factory/carrier unlock for $90. Possible/impossible unless they have contacts at all carriers?
- How easy is it to restore jailbroken/software unlocked phone to stock iOS?
- Any other downsides to jailbreaking the phone besides voiding warranty?
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