My iPhone 4, Un-Jailbroken

When it comes to technology, I try most things once, sometimes twice just in case I thought it did it wrong.  That's what happened to me with my iPhone 4.  I jailbroke it and unlocked it twice yesterday.  After two tries, I unjailbroke it and restored it to AT&T's total control.

The iPhone 4 is the best mobile phone I've ever owned, but it has two problems:

1. It's carrier locked
2. It's a bandwidth hog with few fine-grained controls

The result is a painful lack of functionality when traveling overseas.  I've checked - looking at data consumption info - and seen that checking e-mail even once can consume as uch as 4 megabytes of data.  That's about $4 if you have a data roaming package and you're retreiving images with your messages.  Far too much money to be sustainable.

The result: the phone becomes a $300 iPod Touch when outside the US.  If you could jailbreak it, then you could put in a local sim card and use your phone like a native, provided you can figure out how local data services are configured (not always easy).

Jailbreaking is ridiculously easy and unlocking is too, using the ultrasn0w system, but unlocked phones appear to suck battery for some reason - 3-5% of battery per hour when unlocked in standby mode.  The user forums are full of notes about this and so until that issue is solved, it's rather infeasible to have the phone unlocked.  Hence my re-locking.

I think this issue will be solved soon, I suspect, and when that happens, I will probably re-unlock my phone whenever I travel overseas.  I'm keeping my contract and services with AT&T, but the cost of global roaming is too much to use the phone outside the US without it being unlocked.

iPhone 4, still locked.  Photo from SuperStriker2