iPhone looks awesome!!

[Lezliej]

I think the iPhone looks like the coolest thing around! Will it always be Cingular/AT&T exclusively? Or will it be available at other providers later? Will my AOL mail be able to push in?

Lezlie

[nixgeek]

So far, it's exclusively Cingular/AT&T. We won't know for sure after it's released. As for third party apps, Jobs said that they won't be supported but I don't think it's set in stone.

[fryke]

I'm a dreamer. I still want to buy my iPhone unlocked one day. And with UMTS along with GSM/EDGE. And the camera should be autofocus. And 3rd party apps are kind of a must, I believe, and certainly hope Apple will change its mind.
For Steve's mentioning it (that 3rd party apps could bring the whole mobile network down) alone, I hope that there'll be a hack of some kind where iPhones bring down the networks _without_ official 3rd party app support. I really wonder where that notion came from. At least _I_ haven't ever heard of wide-spread network attacks through, say, a Symbian-based platform, which _widely_ adopts 3rd party applications successfully. Heck: Even the Windows Mobile platform didn't have such a problem AFAIK.

[Lt Major Burns]

unlocked phones can't usually do anything further than phone and text, so MMS, internet, voicemail are tied in with the network, no network, no services AFAIK...

[Qion]

Originally Posted by Lt Major Burns

unlocked phones can't usually do anything further than phone and text, so MMS, internet, voicemail are tied in with the network, no network, no services AFAIK...

Exactly. Apple kinda has reign over that feature... unless another cell phone company wants to risk getting sued and offers unlocked iPhone support...

[fryke]

Err... I guess I really didn't know the situation was _that_ bad over there in the US. In Europe, an unlocked phone does everything the phone ca. You choose the service yourself. Activate MMS, internet etc. the _one_ thing Apple did with the iPhone that wouldn't be possible without special support from a network, is the visual voice mail thing. All the other stuff would simply work with any provider doing GSM, basically. Slower, if only GPRS is available and not EDGE, but it'd still work.

[Lt Major Burns]

is that true? i'm a brit, so i now i have no idea... do you have to ask the phone company to turn the features on?

[Madelin]

No their already there. For instance once its unlocked, if you want to send MMS you have to change the MMS settings within the phones settings to connect to the correct servers...etc...