A lot of people seems to be confused with the terms used throughout the iPhone/iPod touch sphere. Terms like unlocked, unlocking, jailbreak can be harder to understand than history lessons.
Here’s a short summary of what each term means:
Unlocked unit means that your iPhone or iPhone 3G will work with any Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) from any service provider in the world. Your phone might either be factory unlocked, carrier unlocked or user unlocked.
Factory unlocked units work as soon as you pop in any SIM from any carrier. This is the best unit to get. Example of carriers/countries that provide factory unlocked iPhone 3Gs are SingTel (Singapore), 3 (Hong Kong), Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan) and Vodafone (New Zealand) to name a few.
Carried unlocked iPhones are units that have been unlocked by the carrier thru the process of entering a ‘unlock code’. Once this is done, the locked (originally) iPhones become unlocked and shall now work with any SIM from any carrier. Updating the firmware does not ‘relock’ the iPhone.
User unlocked iPhones are units that have been unlocked using software exploitation to allow operation with various service providers. Google for this term and you shall find more information which I would not cover here.
Last but not least is the term jailbreaking. Apple only allows signed code to run on the iPhone and iPod touch. There are many reasons behind this, such as ensuring that your iPhone only runs applications that are certified not to be harmful. However, there are various third-party software out there, which would not receive approval from Apple. Jailbreaking your iPhone/iPod touch would allow these apps to run as if there were signed code.
Check out this link if you’d like more explanation on other terms used.
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