Although Apple designed its CDMA iPhone for the U.S. market and carrier Verizon Wireless, workers for China Telecom say they’ve ‘jailbroken’ the domestic iPhone 4.
The “CDMA iPhone 4 has made its first call in China,” a group of employees at the carrier’s Guangdong branch writes on a blog, according to the Wall Street Journal Wednesday. The blog post is accompanied by a photo of a Verizon Wireless iPhone apparently jailbroken by the Mac version of Greenpois0n.
Although China Telecom emphasized the effort wasn’t officially sanctioned, jailbreaking is often a common response to tight supplies. Apple handsets are often brought from overseas and then cracked, allowing them to be used on a different carrier. This may be the first time a carrier to announce such a tactic. However, “local branches have been known to take matters into their own hands,” the newspaper writes.
China Telecom and China Unicom – the top two carriers in China – have been in a battle to lure iPhone users to their networks. Both operate GSM networks compatible with previous iPhone versions, but only China Unicom could offer 3G data service because it operates with WCDMA 3G. China Mobile uses that country’s own TD-SCDMA standard while China Telecom employs CDMA-2000.
Because China Unicom only offers WCDMA 3G data, China Mobile has tried to lure rival subscribers, providing instructions on trimming SIM cards to fit the iPhone 4’s microSIM card slot. For its part, China Telecom was left out in the cold, because the Verizon CDMA handset could not be used on the carrier’s network. The Cupertino, Calif. company would need to redesign the handset to offer a SIM card slot, as well as make other changes to be in accordance with China, the report says.
[WSJ]
