AT&T says iPhone activation problems largely solved
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AT&T Inc said on Monday delays in activating service for customers of Apple Inc iPhone had been mostly resolved after the wireless company worked out the problems on a case-by-case basis.
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Blog: Rumors emerge that the iPhone will be avaialble to prepaid AT&T users.
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AT&amp;T Wireless and AT&amp;T Corp. have resolved a dispute over branding and reached a new agreement ahead of Cingular Wireless&#39; planned purchase of AT&amp;T Wireless, the three companies said Monday.
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User groups said some customers waited nearly 60 hours without getting the iPhone activated, but AT&T and Apple said the problem affects only a small number of customers.
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The goal is to let users add enhancements such as security or VoIP more quickly, without having to reinstall IOS images on routers and switches.
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AT&T Inc.  said on Thursday it  has hired 2,000 temporary store workers to handle its  much-hyped introduction of the iPhone, the first cell phone  from iPod music player maker Apple Inc. .
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Microsoft Corp. has fixed a problem that made it difficult for users of the most recent Windows Mobile devices to synch with PCs running Vista.
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(InfoWorld) - Efforts to unlock Apple's iPhoneÂ continued on Monday, with hackers claiming "very significant progress." The locked iPhone only works with AT&T's EDGE network, and cannot be used with cellular service from other providers. Locked phones are generally used to help operators recoup the cost of subsidizing handsets for their customers, but AT&T is not subsidizing the iPhone, which is priced at either $499 or $599, depending on the model. Instead, the phone is locked because AT&T has a five-year agreement with Apple to be the sole iPhone provider in the U.S. Unlocking the iPhoneÂ would be a boon for users locked into a contract with another U.S. carrier, or for users outside the U.S. who want an iPhone. While initial signs indicate an unlocked iPhone is possible, hackers must first overcome several challenges. One of those involves circumventing the authentication process in iTunes that both lets users register for an AT&T service plan and turn on the phone's features, including its camera and music player. By Monday evening, U.S. time, hackers had made headway towards circumventing the activation process. But the phone remained locked at the time of writing. "We have been fairly successful in spoofing iTunes activation processes. This should allow us to activate the phone," poster gj wrote on the iPhone Dev Wiki, one of several Web sites tracking efforts to unlock the phone. "It may in fact also prevent the SIM locking from occurring in the first place ... though we haven't verified this yet." These advances allowed hackers to set and read data on the iPhone, including the ability to query whether a phone has been activated. "The rest of our work is legwork really, in understanding how certain functions operate with the rest of the phone," the site said, adding hackers are close to the ability to browse system files on the iPhone, a key step toward unlocking the handset. Once the activation problem has been overcome, hackers will be faced with other questions. For instance, does iTunes have the ability to recognize a phone that was not activated for use with the AT&T network? If so, how will iTunes react? After these questions are resolved, hackers can focus on unlocking the handset itself. That task is made easier by the iPhone's use of a removable SIM (Subscriber Identity Module), a smart card that contains a user's phone number as well as storage space for contacts and messages, instead of one that was hardwired into the phone. The use of a removable SIM card means the iPhone is locked using its firmware, which can likely be cracked. While hackers race ahead to unlock the iPhone as quickly as possible, iPhone Dev Wiki poster gj criticized those hackers competing against each other to unlock the phone, saying the lack of cooperation had slowed progress. "I can't emphasize enough how much this s*** stinks. Trust me, your ego is not as important as you think it is. If everyone worked together we would have been done by now, but instead we have a******* all over the world trying to 'beat us to the punch,'" the poster wrote. Â
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Blog: The good news is that my iPhone is finally activated and it's definitely worth the money. The bad news is that it took AT&T 39 hours to get it done.
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Just how much will the iPhone boost AT&T's business?
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Apple sold 1.7 million more iPhones last year than AT&T activated on its network. The bulk of those, analysts say, were sold to gray market dealers who unlocked them and sold them overseas.
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AT&T Inc said on Monday delays in activating service for customers of Apple Inc.'s iPhone had been mostly resolved after the wireless company worked out the problems on a case-by-case basis.
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About 2 percent of people who bought  the keenly-awaited iPhone, launched on Friday by Apple Inc.  , have been experiencing delays in activating their  service, a person familiar with the matter said on Sunday.
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AT&amp;T Inc. wiped some of the glow off Apple Inc.'s iPhone on Tuesday, releasing numbers that showed fewer people than expected signed up for service in the first two days of the multimedia cell phone's release.
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Berwyn, Pa.-based Triton PCS Holdings Inc., AT&amp;T Wireless Service Inc. and Cingular Wireless LLC said Wednesday they have signed a definitive agreement to resolve problems with Triton&#39;s agreements with AT&amp;T
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Blog: Buying an iPhone was the easy part. After nine hours, AT&T has yet to activate my iPhone, and it can't be used even for playing music or movies until that happens.
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(InfoWorld) - A company that unlocks cell phones in Europe said it is close to having an application that will allow customers to unlock their Apple iPhones so they can use SIM cards from carriers other than AT&T to activate the phones. In an interview this week in New York, John McLaughlin, founder of Belfast, U.K.-based Uniquephones, said he has engineers working around the clock in several countries who are close to cracking the complex security system Apple has set up to ensure customers can only use iPhones with AT&T Wireless service. The race by hackers to unlock iPhones has been on since the phone was released last Friday. Currently, AT&T Wireless has an exclusive deal with Apple to provide service for iPhones, and customers must agree to a two-year service plan with the company. However, customers have complained that the carrier's wireless service is slow, and according to McLaughlin, there has been tremendous interest in the ability to unlock the phone. By Sunday night, he said, more than 150,000 inquires had come in through the Web site he set up to request IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) numbers from customer iPhones. While not everyone would volunteer their IMEI numbers, they still expressed interest in learning how to unlock their iPhones, McLaughlin said. When the site was set up, he thought it would be an easy case of supplying unlock codes from AT&T to unlock iPhones. But sometime over the weekend after iPhones went on sale, unlock codes from AT&T for about 6,000 iPhones disappeared from the carrier's database, and McLaughlin's team also realized it would be a more complex matter than simply providing an unlock code to release iPhones from AT&T's grip. There is at least a two-step process to unlocking an iPhone, McLaughlin said. His team has been able to unlock the activation process to the AT&T SIM card specific to an iPhone so another AT&T SIM card can work with the phone and be activated through iTunes. However, any attempt to change the firmware of an iPhone so it can support another carrier's SIM card breaks the phone, he said. The key to unlocking the phone is breaking the encryption process that protects the token sent through the iTunes activation process to an iPhone's firmware, McLaughlin believes. Norwegian hacker Jon Lech Johansen, also known as "DVD John" because he cracked the DVD encryption scheme, claims he's been able to unlock the iPhone beyond the activation process that requires an AT&T account but said the device can't be used as a phone when that happens. Even after an iPhone were unlocked, it still could only work on carrier networks that support the GSM network, which is what AT&T's service is based on. In the U.S., T-Mobile is the only major carrier on a GSM network. And there is no guarantee Apple will not lock down the phones again in a future firmware update through the iPhone synchronization process or create a new way to unlock the next wave of iPhones they put on the market. That is, in fact, exactly what one analyst said will happen. "I assume that someone will succeed in unlocking the iPhone," said Avi Greengart, principal analyst, mobile devices at Current Analysis. "I also assume Apple will close whatever loophole is open the next time they synchronize [the software]." It's also likely there will be complications with special features of the phone that are designed to work only on AT&T's network, such as the visual voicemail feature, he said. Greengart said that he sympathizes with those that might want to use an iPhone with another carrier but "that's not the way the product was designed." "Exclusive agreements are not that unusual in this industry at all," he said. Aaron Santell, an iPhone user in New York, said that he would have preferred to use the service provider he has for his Blackberry device, Verizon Wireless, when he purchased an iPhone. But using AT&T's service is "a small price to pay" to use a device that provides such a rich user experience as the iPhone does, he said. As one might imagine, unlocking phones is a thorny issue with carriers, which certainly don't condone it. Carriers will give users unlock codes upon request for a fee, but they don't encourage the practice. In the U.K. and Europe, third parties have been unlocking handsets for several years, although there is no law that specifically protects them, McLaughlin said. However, in the U.S., it is legal to unlock mobile handsets under an amendment to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that was passed in November 2006. McLaughlin said that even though it's legal in the U.S. to unlock phones, he anticipates that if his team is successful, Apple may take legal action against them based on their tinkering with the firmware. "They'll probably come after us for copyright infringement," he said. Apple did not reply to requests for comment Thursday. McLaughlin plans to charge customers about $49.99 for software to unlock iPhones. Even if Uniquephones is not the first to offer unlocking capability, it won't be hard for them to replicate what others have done once the encryption is cracked, he added.