iPhones in China Turned into Bricks…

From a Chinese news source, here’s the link

As hackers “decode” and “decypher” the softwares in iPhones, this hottie has been one popular item in ShangHai, China. A lot of digital electronic stores or regular electronic stores are quietly selling iPhones, and the demand is far more greater than the supply. According to Apple, Inc., there are about 250,000 iPhones that have been cracked, the selling data indicates that there are 1.4 million iPhones sold.

The Chinese internet users gave the iPhone fanatics a pretty nice name,Ai-Feng, which is very closed to “iPhone.” Literally translated, it means “love-crazy.” Guess they love iPhone to crazy, kind of suits the situation. The Ai-Fengs find out that after an iPhone’s cracked, many times it will be forced to be shut down and then turn into a “brick.” It just dies. Experts of the markets suggest the consumers not to buy iPhones because that there are high risks involved in buying iPhone at this period, and the buyers won’t get any after-sale support from Apple and there’s no guarantees.

There is a sign sticking on the door of an electronic store in PuDong District, “8G iPhone, 4280 Yuan (roughly about $612), now accepting pre-order.” Apparently the iPhones in the stores have already been ordered and if you want to buy one, you have to order it now and wait in line to get it later on.

In another store, one of the sales quietly says that the newly introduced softwares this month have been “perfectly cracked.” Now users can use Chinese to input messages. The cracks fixed the problem of switching between Chinese and English. Plus other entertaining resources, iPhone can be almost used as a regular cellphone in China now.

One of Ai-Fengs, Serhan, has cracked several iPhones already. He says that after the cracking, it becomes much more stronger. Several hundreds Yuan have to be paided to crack iPhone before, with the recently cracks, it’s very easy to download the crack method online.

Because iPhone only uses the SIM card from AT&T to be activated, Apple has announced that cracking the softwares may damage the phone itself, and Apple is not going to be responsible for such consequences. So, even the hackers are perfecting the cracks, holes will be hard to avoided.

Some consumers who bought iPhone have suffered the iPhone-turn-into-brick situation. On one of the popular ShangHai digital forum, a user with the name “qqgg” says in a post that after he has bought the phone, the phone dies after he follows the instructions on the internet of how to crack the iPhone. At this moment, there’s nothing he can do but to send the phone back to the USA for repair, like all the other “brick” owners.

And because iPhone uses American platform to conduct information flow, Chinese users always get their infomation late. So it’s also a brick if you get stock information even a few seconds later than others.

Experts advise because that the current iPhones in ShangHai are all from secondary channels, with a number of unstable variables, high risk involved in them, consumers should NOT buy iPhones until it has officially be introduced into the Chinese market, and to buy the REAL iPhones.

~ by kunzilla on October 30, 2007.