In an interview reported by The Wall Street Journal  on Tuesday, Yamada said the “closed operating system of the iPhone,” which prevents the carrier from pre-loading apps like its e-wallet and i-mode email service, doesn’t work for NTT DoCoMo. The reason that’s a problem? Those software additions are “important for Japanese customers.”

Of course, if that were true, there would be no problem with simply providing instructions detailing how to download the apps from the App Store to iPhone buyers post-purchase. Clearly, if the software was so desirable, customers wouldn’t mind a little legwork to get them. But the reason NTT DoCoMo (and all carriers) want to pre-load software onto devices is to give them more control over the customer and their spending practices.

Apple was instrumental in loosening the hold carriers had on content and access to services on cellular devices. Anyone over 25 remembers a time when if you wanted to browse the web on your phone, you used a terrible, limited, proprietary browser managed by your carrier that probably only provided access to select sites. Music stores, ringtones, wallpapers, etc.: All were once the exclusive province of your network provider. On Android devices, the situation isn’t quite that dire, but the presence of half-hearted attempts at carrier-branded stores and software is still a depressing reminder of a far less free mobile past.

Apple changed all that with the iPhone, which shipped with no pre-loaded carrier software, provided unfettered access to the web, and with the App Store, introduced a litany of choice when it came to services like navigation, another area once notoriously dominated on mobile devices by network operators.

Another reason cited by Yamada for not picking up the iPhone is Apple’s extraordinary upfront commitment requirement. The volume of device orders Apple insists on means carriers have to promote the iPhone heavily, which could result in a huge percentage of its subscribers on Apple devices. That in turn leads to less control of the customer relationship through measures like the aforementioned branded bloatware.

If it simply wanted to extend its reach as far and as wide as possible, Apple could ease its restrictions and allow carriers to preinstall an app or two. That would go a long way toward making its other conditions more palatable to network operators. But instead, the iPhone maker clearly wants to maintain complete control of its product, even if that means throwing back a big fish like NTT DoCoMo.

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Softbank’s net income for its first fiscal quarter of this year was ¥94.79 billion ($1.22 billion U.S.), which is up from ¥19.44 billion (around $250 million U.S. with current exchange rates) for the same period in 2010. Softbank says smartphones in general helped raise revenue, but the carrier has exclusive rights to sell the iPhone in Japan, where Apple is still the leading smartphone manufacturers by a wide margin.

Sales of Apple hardware may be contributing quite a bit to Softbank’s bottom line, but it also helps by increasing the average revenue per user (ARPU) for Softbank customers. Data ARPU climbed to a record high ¥2,440 per subscriber per month on average, putting it first overall in the world among mobile operators when it comes to the ratio of data to traditional cellular services ARPU. This is a significant victory as smartphones and apps encourage greater use of data in situations where previously voice or text played a more significant role.

Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son told TeleGeography in an interview that he believes Apple’s smartphone is only getting started, and stands to benefit from the general rise in smartphone popularity. Specifically, Son said “the iPhone’s strength is standing out the more people come to use smartphones,” suggesting that the iPhone’s advantages stand out better when compared to its competitors.

This represents only the latest in a string of very strong quarters for Softbank since the iPhone’s release on the network. So far, there’s no official indication that Softbank’s exclusive deal with Apple in Japan will end, and I’m sure that based on these results, that’s something the carrier is very happy about.

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The news, which comes via The iPhone Blog, is a promising sign for all iPhone users. If Apple is at all a party to the decision to allow unlocking of its devices in countries where the iPhone is available on multiple networks, then hope exists for countries like Canada, too, where the iPhone recently became available on Bell and Telus, as well as Rogers, the original carrier.

O2 CEO Matthew Key describes in an interview with the Times Online how customers will be able to unlock, though that won’t relieve them of their contractual obligations:

Once the iPhone becomes available on other UK networks, we will allow O2 customers to unlock their iPhones, although of course they will still need to honor any outstanding contract period they have. At the end of their contract period, they are entirely free to move to another operator — though naturally we hope they won’t want to!

It isn’t clear how the unlocking procedure will actually work. Will users have to physically visit an O2 store, or can it be done over the phone using iTunes at home? Whatever the method, O2 is doing the right thing by providing its customers a choice, which is a good faith gesture which should end up building customer loyalty and avoiding resentment. No word yet on whether or not other UK carriers will be offering the same service for their iPhone devices.

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And that’s precisely what’s happening. Back in July, I reported here that China Unicom had secured the deal to supply to the iPhone in China. Just two weeks ago other sites were reporting the same thing and now, according to the Wall Street Journal, rival carrier China Mobile appears to be getting in on the action, too.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum, China Mobile’s chairman Wang Jianzhou said that Apple’s deal with competitor China Unicom was “…absolutely not exclusive.”

“We are still in talks,” added Mr Wang, “so I can’t say anything else.”

China Mobile was, for a time, the favorite for securing a deal to offer the iPhone in China but apparently negotiations hit a roadblock over Apple’s business model which, at that time, was based around revenue-sharing. In November 2007, speaking at the GSM Association’s Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, Mr Wang told attendees that he did not like the new business models emerging in the mobile phone industry — specifically, device manufacturers seeking to share revenues with cellular network operators. Instead, he asserted, “We still think we can maintain the operator-centric model because we have the customers, the end users.”

They certainly do. China Mobile is the country’s largest cell network operator with over 420 million subscribers. That’s more than the entire population of the United States.

This move marks the first time since the launch of the iPhone in 2007 that Apple has not expressly fostered an exclusive arrangement with a single carrier in a country, but is instead pursuing arrangements with multiple carriers.

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The above image is the not-often-seen official unlock notification, as displayed in iTunes. The dialogue succinctly confirms that the user’s iPhone, in this case a 3G, has been unlocked and can now be used on any carrier. Note the Apple logo at the top left — this is a result of an official unlock sanctioned by Apple.

Read on to find out how I legally unlocked my iPhone 3G.

In June, while over 1 million early adopters in the U.S. picked up their brand new iPhone 3GS devices, I was anxiously waiting for the official launch in my current country of residence, Finland. I picked up my iPhone 3GS in Helsinki just two weeks ago, when it was finally launched by Sonera.

Regarding Sonera, think of it as a less-repugnant version of AT&T. As the exclusive distributor of the iPhone over in Finland, Sonera has turned out to be a somewhat benevolent carrier. The carrier’s unlimited data plan is reasonably priced, and home hacking your iPhone to tether to your Macbook is positively encouraged.

And now I’ve discovered that Sonera is also happy to lend a helping hand in unlocking your old iPhone 3G. When the 3G was released last year, Sonera customers had to sign up for a two-year contract. When upgrading to the iPhone 3GS, those same customers are given the option to pay off the remainder of their original 3G contract. Paying off the contract, and thus completing the two years prematurely, entitles the customer to have their iPhone 3G unlocked.

The helpful assistant at the Sonera store made a note of my IMEI number and then passed it onto his boss — after that there’s a special piece of software that only his boss is authorized to use. This mystical application submits the IMEI to Apple, which in turn authorizes the device for unlocking.

I was advised that when the iPhone 3G was next synced with iTunes, it would be unlocked. Minutes later, back at home, I connected the iPhone 3G to iTunes and received a new carrier settings update. After downloading and installing the update, Apple’s official iPhone unlock screen appeared.

Going the legit route was a much more painless process than using a proxy SIM or the Dev Team’s unofficial unlock. Also worth noting is that, unlike some of the illicit approaches, this unlock is permanent: I’ll be able to keep updating the iPhone’s OS without losing the ability to use any carrier SIM in the device.

It was a surprisingly quick, easy and free unlock for me, although I’d be very interested to find out if any of our readers around the world have had similar success in unlocking their iPhones.

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If you’ve been enjoying your new iPhone 3GS, but have been missing the freedom of jailbreak since your hardware upgrade (and you were skittish about the early purplera1n release), then you’re in luck, because yesterday the Dev Team officially released updated versions of redsn0w and ultrasn0w that are compatible with Apple’s newest handset. That also means you can unlock the device (though earlier versions of ultrasn0w were technically compatible as well) without worry. Except for the usual worries, which are, as always, many and include potentially voiding your warranty.

As some of you may recall, the Dev Team was originally planning on holding off on a 3GS jailbreak release until after the official 3.1 firmware update from Apple dropped. In doing so, they were hoping to prevent Cupertino from plugging the exploit they use to access and jailbreak the 3GS with the next release. Dev Team member George Hotz (Geohot) took issue with that cautious stance, pointing out that playing cat-and-mouse with Apple was basically unavoidable anyway, so why not just tackle exploits as they become available, instead of trying to put one over on the software giant? In their post, the Dev Team doesn’t actually debate the merits of either position, they just plainly state that there was no reason to hold back the release with purplera1n already being widely available.

If you can get past the dangers inherent in any jailbreaking activity, and you really want to try out great Cydia and Icy apps like Backgrounder, Boss Prefs, and all the rest, head on over to the Dev Team Blog now for more info on where you can find the official releases. Call me boring, but I’m sticking with my vanilla 3.0 install until Apple irons out all the quirks of the latest device, just in case a trip to the Genius Bar becomes a necessary last resort.

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This week, Apple deviated from their usual biweekly update schedule and released yet another installment of the iPhone OS 3.0 beta. As of last week, the beta has been accompanied by an iTunes 8.2 pre-release build, and an updated version of that accompanies the beta firmware and the SDK. Aside from the single-week interval, the beta is also unusual in that it was released on a Wednesday night, instead of a Tuesday, when Apple has usually released new iterations in the past.

There are a few different reasons Apple might be stepping up the release schedule. First, WWDC is coming up very soon, and they might be speeding up the development schedule in order to get a stable product out the door come early June. They might also have picked up on a nasty security vulnerability before anyone else did for once, and therefore a quick patch along with any bug fixes completed to date was required.

There’s a final reason for the early release, which seems to be best supported by the information available to date. It looks like Apple has tried to block MMS access entirely for Beta users by preventing people from being able to switch carrier .IPCC files via iTunes. With all earlier builds, it was possible to do a force restore to an edited version of the file, which users had managed to hack in order to enable tethering and MMS on their devices, which were not meant to be available to users until the full version of the OS is released. The update also hides MMS features in the iPhone’s GUI for U.S. users. The MMS functions have never been visible on my iPhone, which is Canadian.

Apple looks to have pushed out an early release specifically to stop users from fooling around with hacked .IPCC files, and given the odd timing of the release, probably at the insistence of AT&T and/or others of their carrier partners. It’s possible that the early iTunes build was introduced specifically to stop this, and that the first build either didn’t succeed or was introduced early just to allay suspicion as to its ultimate purpose. This also seems to indicated that the beta pool is large enough that unauthorized MMS and tethering usage was actually having a significant effect on carriers.

Either way, we’ll have to wait and see if developers come up with another workaround. If not, there’s only a month left before WWDC ’09, so users anxious to get MMS and tethering up and running won’t have long to wait.

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In the interests of all those readers who need to unlock their iPhone 3G’s for use on different carriers, I donned my investigative hat and tested an iPhone 3G unlock that really seems to work.

While the iPhone Dev Team plunder the secrets of the mysterious baseband in search of the ever elusive software unlock, some of us regular users just can’t wait. In this article, I’ll run you through a typical hardware unlock process, highlighting some of the quirks and a couple of awful potential drawbacks.

As some of this is arguably questionable, The Apple Blog must warn you that you’re doing this at your own risk. Seriously. In fact, one iPhone 3G was totally borked in the process of testing this — almost relegated to a desolate Apple graveyard; nevertheless, in the interest of finding out if we really could unlock the iPhone 3G, we persevered.

Again, The Apple Blog does not endorse your attempts at any of what follows, it could ruin your iPhone. Furthermore, this is not an official solution and as such, it is totally unsupported by Apple. That being said, let the fun begin.

Hardware Unlock

What we’re looking at here is a hardware unlock, which may not be ideal, but it does the job. The unlock I’m investigating today is a hardware workaround for what is in reality a software issue. The perfect solution would be a software unlock — something which the iPhone Dev Team (a bunch of clever hackers not to be confused with official Apple developers) are working diligently towards.

In fact, by way of providing a bit of background on the subject of unlocking, while providing a final word of warning, the iPhone Dev Team had this to say on their blog earlier this year:

We’ve been monitoring the whole “SIM-card unlock” proxy-SIM situation… These sim mods so far seem very very very questionable… they use trickery of the GSM and UMTS network that is considered highly illegal in most countries and they rely on sending bogus IMSIs and various other nasty hacks to obtain service on your iPhone.

Proxy SIM

SIM PIG Proxy-Sim

There are a variety of different hardware unlocks which tend to be referred to as piggyback SIMs or proxy-SIMs. The one I chose to test in this article is branded as Any Network. Unlike all the other proxy-SIMs, apparently I could just stick this one in my phone and be totally unlocked — no cutting, no updating, no hassle (or so I thought).

The proxy-SIM looks like a small circuit board in the shape of a regular SIM card with a chip at the top; it’s made out of what seems to be a very thin, bendy and tearable, plastic. The murky brown device certainly looks somewhat illicit and is designed to be squeezed in to the iPhone with your regular SIM card.

Installation

Now that we’ve got all the background details out the way, I’ll run you through what happened when I installed the Any Network SIM. My aim was to be able to use my Finnish iPhone — locked to Apple’s official Finnish carrier of choice — in the UK, using an unsupported UK carrier’s SIM.

1. Although the folks at Any Network claim their solution is the only one which doesn’t require cutting my carrier SIM card, I did so anyway. The carrier SIM was cut in half and taped to the proxy-SIM. Placing both SIMs on to the tray and sliding them in to the iPhone seemed to be too tight a squeeze.
2. Phoned tech support at Any Network, they suggest I use tape (done) and to keep squeezing it in. This ended badly, the SIM tray popped out, but the proxy-SIM and carrier SIM didn’t — they are stuck to the inside of the iPhone. Slightly tearful, I send my iPhone away to be replaced.
3. After a horrific false start, my iPhone 3G is fixed and sent back to me a couple of weeks later…I also track down a new proxy-SIM. This time around, my plan is to make my carrier SIM card so thin that it comfortably sits in the caddy with the proxy-SIM. Using a scalpel, I spend a few hours delicately shaving away the layers of my carrier SIM until, despite looking like it’s been the victim of a particularly aggressive knife-crime, it is perfectly thin.
4. My crafty scalpel plan worked. Both the SIM and the proxy-SIM are quite snug in the iPhone tray together. I begin sliding them in but discover it’s still a tight squeeze and, if I slide at the wrong angle, the proxy-SIM is liable to slide out inside my iPhone (thus repeating the horrific accident in step 1).
5. I manage to squeeze the tray in to the iPhone. With a storm of nerves erupting in my tummy, I turn my iPhone on… invalid SIM. Disappointed, I sit staring at the screen, I did everything I could to make it work. Minutes later, as a sit in a dirge of disappointment, a tiny miracle happens: the invalid SIM message disappears. To the top left of the screen, my iPhone’s signal bar blinks in to existence. I have coverage.
6. I decide the next thing to do is to test my signal. I call the operator number, it rings, it works, I’m through. With my iPhone 3G unlocked, I find the 3G settings on the carrier’s site — entering these in to the Network settings menu on my iPhone unlocks almost all of the device’s full potential: I can’t get visual voicemail but I can surf the net, download e-mail and even listen to Last.fm.
7.  Plugging in to iTunes for my first unlocked sync, I discover a new problem. iTunes sees my proxy-SIM as an invalid SIM card (in retrospect, this is to be expected). After a little bit of fiddling, I find out that it works if I first eject the SIM tray (and thus the illicit proxy-SIM) and then plug in to iTunes.
8. While syncing, I also happen upon a method for inserting the SIM and proxy-SIM in the iPhone 3G which seems much safer. I first put the proxy-SIM on the tray and slide the tray halfway in to the iPhone; then the carrier SIM is slid in to the iPhone separately and squeezed in to place on top of the proxy-SIM. This sounds somewhat unpleasant, but, for me, seems to be a less risky way of inserting the device.

After several weeks of testing, I can reveal that the unlock does indeed work. Of course, as the iPhone Dev Team noted, this is a questionable solution and indeed a nasty hack (especially when considering that it can lead to physically damaging the hardware). Nevertheless, it really works and, barring occasional drops in 3G signal, is problem free in practice.

Have you tried a hardware unlock for the iPhone 3G? Perhaps you’re waiting for the iPhone Dev Team’s software unlock? Share your thoughts about iPhone unlocking in the comments.

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