I just realized why Apple is willing to sell the iPhone for $199. No it’s not the kickback from AT&T. It’s the apps! They’re undoubtedly losing money on the device and banking on the fact that people will purchase so many apps over the life of the device. Sound familiar? Yup, it’s the same business model as the video game console market.
Maybe I’m the last one to realize this…
Simply watch the video above.. This is the first iPhone app I’ve seen that takes advantage of it’s unique abilities. Imagine this game with OTA multiplayer built in! I’m a sucker for good puzzlers so I just might have to pick up the non-existent iPhone 3g.
I’ve been following the saga of iPhoneSimFree.com which claims to have a 100% software solution for unlocking the iPhone. So far they’re only selling licenses in bulk for $36 for 50. (That is make the iPhone accept other sim cards besides AT&T. I also find their name ironic in that it contains the word free when they’re selling the software.)
So far they’ve released videos on all major gadget blogs here and here. Except that no normal consumer has the software in hand… save one guy from UK it looks like.
With all the doubts, PR, the shady bank-wire-only-purchases by iPhoneSimFree, and Paypal pre-order only distributors I’m simply going to wait. Wait until the iPhoneDevTeam puts out their free solution. The Apple fanatics are a rabid and hack-tastic bunch, so I have no doubt that a free solutions will be released shortly.
I have a 4gb unopened iPhone sitting here on my desk which I bought for $299 when Apple.com was clearing them out. I want to use it unlocked with my T-mobile sim card so I can switch off carrying my Pearl when I don’t need all that bulk.
Update
We’ve (AdMobsters) opened the iPhone and started hacking on it. We’re trying out this method here released by the iPhoneDevTeam. I’ve was trolling #iPhone and got everything prepared but we had to fake activate the iPhone first. Definitely learned a lot in the last couple hours and am in the middle of installing SSH required to get things going.
We activated and jailbroke using INdependence which you MUST use over iActivator if you’ve upgraded to iTunes 7.4 (which we learned the hard way =| ). Now we’re installing some stuff and will try to hack which involves some command line magic. I’m sure that tomorrow morning the iPhone Dev Team will release a nice .app and a nice GUI to automate the entire thing. We’re just impatient like that 
Update 2
We’ve successfully unlocked using the manual method here. There is also a GUI unlocker here.
Update 3
Here is the latest and greatest GUI iPhone Unlocker from the original iPhoneDevTeam. It unlocks your phone in 3-5 mins (the previous ones flashed in 20 mins). Tested and should work for most iPhones.
The phoneless iPhone iPod Touch is now official. $299 for a wifi iPod with full browser. What does this mean? Cheaper to develop, bigger audience can only translate to more iPhone specific sites!
All those iPhone sites ( facebook, digg.com, etc ) have now increased in value. Along with it, iPhone specific ad units… with wifi becoming more and more abundant this will only be a good thing for mobile.
Josh Cantone from read/write echoes the same sentiment.
The iPhone has been great for mobile, it’s given a full browser to the mobile world. Except for one thing, it’s Safari, which can be good and bad. It’s good for example if you’re developing an app for iPhone, you have one browser to test and develop against. It’s bad because it’s Safari, not known to be the best of browsers.
At AdMob, I’m responsible for developing the javascript ad code for our iPhone specific code. Recently we’ve been experiencing odd behavior on sites where the ad code would simply not run. We finally narrowed it down to the fact that sites were setting content type as application/xhtml+xml. When Safari is in this mode it doesn’t like you doing such things as document.createElement(’div’) or eL.innerHTML = ‘<div>text<div>’ or even eL.innerHTML = ‘text’; all of which are normal dhtml techniques.
Instead it expects you to use document.createElementNS and document.createTextNode which are the proper way to add XHTML elements. So I ended up having to rewrite our entire iPhone javascript code and a simple nifty utility function. 
var createElement = function(type, props, styles) {
var d = document.createElementNS('http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml', 'html:' + type);
for(var i in props)
d[i] = props[i];
for(var i in styles)
d.style[i] = styles[i];
return d;
};
// usage
eL.appendChild(createElement('div', { id : 'divId' },
{ float : 'left', width : 100px' }));