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CRACK AND TALK: iPhone

by MICHAEL CITROME

Membership has its privileges. And being an Apple iPhone owner in Montreal is a fairly exclusive club.

First off, the $399 (U.S.) smartphone/MP3 player/Web device is not sold in Canada—in fact, it’s not even sold within a three-hour drive of Montreal (a mobile carrier quirk keeps it off the market in neighbouring Vermont).

The closest iPhone dealer is 355 kilometres away, in Albany, New York, and they may ask you for an American credit card and mailing address, without which you will leave the Apple Store iPhoneless.

But acquiring the iPhone isn’t the whole challenge—not even close. You have to crack (unlock) it in order to get the iPhone to work on a Canadian mobile network, unless you don’t mind signing up with AT&T and paying roaming charges when you call AUTOBUS.

Currently, only two Canadian mobile carriers support the GSM standard and SIM cards necessary to activate an iPhone in Canada: Rogers and its subsidiary Fido. So if you already have a phone with either of those carriers, the SIM card inside is your first step to Canadian iPhone-ness.

High on crack

Now, the cracking part. Fact is, you don’t have to be a sophisticated computer hacker (read: 16-year-old) to unlock an iPhone these days. But up until just before Valentine’s Day, even the savviest Apple ninja who picked up a boxed iPhone hoping to use it with a Canadian carrier was pretty much out of luck.

Why’s that? Since late fall, iPhones have been shipping with an erstwhile uncrackable firmware (the built-in operating system). I had the good fortune of getting my iPhone back in October, when they were still shipping with the crackable version 1.1.1 firmware (1.1.2 came out in mid-November). When people asked me where I got it cracked, I would smugly smile and say, “Oh, I did it myself, didn’t take very long either.”

And it sure didn’t. It took about an hour, and on a scale of difficulty, well, installing a printer is slightly more work. And now, since Valentine’s, a new cracking technique has been revealed that works on all iPhones, and in about an hour, you can be installing hacker-made applications and talking on the Rogers network too.

One of my friends was so ecstatic that his $400 phone was now, well, a phone, after months of it simply being an expensive iPod, that he barely stopped short of bear-hugging total strangers.

That fleeting sense of exclusivity

So now that it’s possible, again, for nearly anyone to activate an iPhone in Canada, what does this imminent loss of exclusivity mean for current iPhone-toting Montrealers? The loss of the clubby camaraderie we feel when we spot another smart, gorgeous early-adopter pinching and squeezing on a touch-sensitive screen. Of course, it can be hard to tell whether it’s a real iPhone or that phone-less, camera-less, speaker-less, Bluetooth-less pretender, the iPod Touch. Also, expect less delighted ooh-ing and aah-ing and breathy tones of, “Is that an iPhone?” or, as I got from a RAZR-using friend recently, a simple, “I hate you.”

The best strategy to preserve exclusivity is just to convince people not to get one. And there are plenty of reasons not to buy an iPhone right now. No warranty in Canada, no decent data plan ($65 for one gigabyte on the Rogers PC Card plan is the best option, and it pales in comparison to the American offerings) and uncertainty over whether Rogers will suddenly announce a Canadian iPhone plan that excludes cracked grey-market phones.

And then there’s the biggest cold-feet factor of all: when will Apple reveal a 3G iPhone that provides fast wireless data instead of the ultra-slow, James May-esque EDGE standard the phone currently supports? Rogers has a 3G network—is that what they’re waiting for?

You should definitely not get an iPhone until we know for sure. In the meantime, just be jealous of mine.