Verizon iPhone 4 cannot be unlocked

This post will put all of the rumors to rest: you will not see an unlock for the Verizon iPhone. We’re sorry to be the bearer of bad news but the complication involved with the Verizon iPhone unlock is two-fold: it’s completely illegal, and every unlock would require carrier-specific adjustments to succeed. If you were to follow @MuscleNerd and @pytey on Twitter, you too would have come across this information. The conversation started with MuscleNerd tweeting this: An “unlock” of next week’s iPhoneVZW is more than just custom code exec… it involves per-carrier CDMA adjustments. Pytey chimed in right away to explain that this is outright illegal: A non-sanctioned iP4VZ ‘unlock’ would require an ESN/MEID from a donor phone with service. This technique is a US federal crime. That’s not awesome. We don’t assume that everyone will understand that, s0 let us break it down for you. We can unlock AT&T iPhones because they are GSM — they use a SIM card to talk to the carrier. The AT&T SIM card can be removed and replaced with a T-Mobile (or an international carrier’s) SIM card. The current unlock only changes how the phone can communicate with the SIM card… it [...]

Verizon iPhone 4 rumors persist

To be honest, we’re extremely tired of writing about the potential Verizon iPhone. Everyone knows that the iPhone 4 exclusivity contracts are either recently expired, will expire soon or invalidated by AT&T’s terrible representation of a great Apple product. We can’t pick one source for this article… it’s been discussed by countless sources since the 1st generation iPhone came out in 2007. Instead of getting your hopes up, we’ll give you all of the reasons the iPhone won’t be coming to Verizon any time soon (was that too confident?). Hardware If you’re reading this website, you probably know this: the iPhone 4 cannot work on Verizon. Unlocking your iPhone can only get you to T-Mobile here in the United States and maybe some smaller carriers that piggyback on the GSM networks. Let’s go further… current iPhone hardware uses GSM technology to reach your cell provider. GSM is a well-utilized standard across the world: Verizon is one of the few networks using CDMA. Hardware is the main reason a Verizon rollout would be difficult.