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German Court Rules iPhone Locking Legal
l-ascorbic writes "A German court has overturned Vodafone's temporary injunction against T-Mobile. Two weeks ago, the British mobile network won an injunction forcing T-Mobile to sell iPhones that were not locked to its network. Vodafone argued that locking is an anti-competitive practice, and sought to force the German network to permanently allow the use of the phones on other networks. After the injunction was granted, T-Mobile offered the unlocked phones for €999 ($1473), and these will now be withdrawn from sale."
It doesn't really surprise me.
If you read some of Apple's statments when they released the iPhone they mention that they're figuring the revenue differently. They said that the revenue from iPhones would be spread out over the term of the service contract. My impression was that AT&T was actually paying Apple a share of the monthly service charges.
It does seem a little pricey anyway. Maybe T-Mobile was trying to discourage people from going for the unlocked phones.
Pff, yeah and that government has it's own money.
It's a licence every owner of a TV or radio has to pay, i.e. The People.
Sure the BBC has it's own biases, show me a truly neutral person.
But at least the BBC can't be bought by corporate greed.
But then your mentioning of Fox on the same line as the BBC makes me fear I've overheard a Whoosh!
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
There. Fixed.
Funded, not controlled. we have the same system in Norway, and it really works. NRK (our equivalent of BBC) is no less critical towards the gov't than the independent channels. However, it has no commercial breaks :D
I spent five minutes stealing cool sigs and all I got was this.
There are no class action lawsuits in Germany. Each proud owner of an iBrick would have to sue T-Mobile individually.
Not all US iPhones are unlocked fully yet. If you were lucky to buy one with version 1.0.0/1.0.2/1.1.1 of the firmware, then you are good to go. But if you have the newest iPhones (including ones sold in the UK), then you got version 1.1.2 with newest bootloader, then you are out of luck so far. See more details here about the iPhone unlocking status.