As I’ve mentioned in a previous post O2 will now unlock your iPhone. It’s free if you are on contract and £15 on PAYG. However on PAYG they won’t unlock until you have had the phone for a year. If you are on contract you’ll still have to pay up until the end of your contract.
I can confirm that the process works. I’m on a contract, filled in the online form and after about a week recieved a text telling me that me phone was now unlocked. To complete the process you have to put an non-O2 sim into the phone and connect to iTunes. iTunes then confirms the unlock. Reading other forums it seems that there have been a few problems with the online form and some people have had their request to unlock rejected. This has led to a certain amount of paranoia amongst those who have jailbroken their phones that this maybe the reason. Further reading seems to prove that’s not the case and that resummitting the online form solves the problem. It does not seem that O2 can detect jailbroken phones as part of the unlock process.
I’ve tried sims from Orange, Vodaphone, Three and an Isle of Man O2 card in my phone and they all work as does my original O2 sim. It’s going to be really useful next time I want to use my phone abroad as I’ll be able to use a local sim card.
One thing you’ll need to unlock your phone is an O2 sim as the online form needs an O2 number to be inputted. It does appear though that this doesn’t have to be the same number as you originally purchased with the phone. Although whether the year on PAYG is measured via the Sim or the IMEI on the phone I wouldn’t know.
I’ve found the iPhone very useful for work. I’ve stopped printing out call sheets now I can have them available on my phone. The email works brilliantly and the maps have helped me out of a hole more than once. It’s very useful to be able to check while at work that the call sheet has arrived for the following day without having to wait until I get home. If I’m a passenger in a car anytime during the day I can sometimes catch up on the more important emails then saving me time at the end of the day. So many hotels have wifi now that it makes the internet very easy to use while on the road.
Leisure time wise my favourite app has to be the Cleartune instrument tuner which as great to have with me all the time.
In short I’ve found the iPhone a brilliant piece of kit. The brief dealings I’ve had with O2 customer service also seem to be good. My only gripe is with the network coverage which even on 2G does not seem to be as comprehensive as either Orange or Vodaphone. My standby sim – on Asda mobile which uses the vodaphone network seems a real winner both for network and price 8p calls and texts and fairly reasonable data costs also. A bargain if PAYG is what you are looking for and it now works in my iPhone for those moments when O2 is out of network.
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