Our man in Hong Kong got the inside story on the $1,765 (HK$13,800) completely unlocked phone: like we suspected, the shop is using the the Turbo SIM card method that anyone can do. This is the same people who were trying to sell the "80% unlocked" iPhones —meaning "activated" and no calls— a while back.

G-World in Mong Kok is the only one store trying to sell these phones. They have 100 units in stock and until it sells them all, G-World says they won't offer their unlocking services, which they plan to sell for a whooping $767.

In other words, considering that the Turbo SIM card costs only $80, this is a total rip-off no matter how you look at it even if the phones work perfectly:

I played around with his iPhone and Bluetooth headset and everything works perfectly over HK's own GPRS/EDGE networks. YouTube notably still doesn't work (has anyone figured out why that is yet?) but everything else works perfectly. I tried making calls, sending SMS, surfing the web etc and all worked fine. And it's all in Chinese too, though of course there's no Chinese text entry. He was raving about how much he loved it and how perfect it was for them.

I would advise anyone wanting a JesusPhone out of the US to get a Turbo SIM themselves and follow up the publicly available instructions (more on that when we get our cards, which after a long delay are coming here on monday).

Labels: iPhone

---