bottom line is no one will ever stop hacking or modifying!, theres always a geek or two willing to take these companies on and make them look stupid again and again.

if you bought the product, you own it, you choose how and what happends to it, its your iphone! not theres!, you dont get ferrari telling there customers “no you have to buy New!, genuine parts and only from our approved dealers” or else!

what happend to selling the iphone and “thankyou for choosing our product”! it cost over £300!! how many of these phones have been sold alone? aint that good enough?

also if the phones were left unlocked then most of the modds and hack would never of got as far as they have, and apps being deleted!???? lol well thats just a great way of pushing your customers away from your next upcoming trend setting product.

However – I do have my device jailbroken. Why?. Because its the only way IO can delete the power config file from the device to stop the damn thing turning off all the time.

Does this mean that apple will require me to choose between a phone which remains on or paid apps?

Let me see – what would my choice be – oh yeah – sell the iphone and buy the android!!!

1. Does G-Map support real time Guidance? Such as Turn-by-Turn arrow and Voice prompt? Currently, our application doesn’t support turn by turn guidance including voice prompt. This is based on APPLE’s strict strategy which prohibits any real time guidance. Once there’s any positive change in APPLE strategy, we’ll support this function.

As for unlocking issues, they could be eliminated altogether with better law/policies. In some countries, for example, it’s illegal to lock the phone to a particular network. Also, even if the career locks the phone it should be in the agreement that the phone must be unlocked upon request (free of charge, that is) at least in the following situations: 1 – a person moves to another country, 2 – upon expiration of the original contract.

Also, I would just point out that there IS a turn-by-turn nav app in the iTunes AppStore, G-Map:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewArtist?id=293124191

Now, one thing that really makes no sense to me is companies that don’t let you do what yoh want with your property, that’s why I’m against DRM. For example, I own Civ 4, a computer game. I would like to play whenever I want, but thanks to the developers, I need to have the disk in the drive to play the game. So, I went to my local torrent site and downloaded a No CD version of the game I bought so I could do that.

What Google has done here is to destroy the functionality of some of their phones to prevent piracy. Now, if I were to unlock the phone because, say I moved to a foreign country and I wanted to use my phone on the legitimate carrier there and the paid apps dissappeared I would literally be forced to pirate them.

I use that example because that is precisely what happened to me recently. I bought an iPhone in the States, used it on AT&T and was perfectly happy. Then I decide to go to school in the UK. I go to the Apple store and ask if my iPhone will work with the legitimate carrier there, o2. They said “Yeah, no problem, just swap SIM cards and you’ll be fine.” That would’ve been great, however when I go to the o2 store to activate, it doesn’t work. The carrier tells me to unlock it if I want to use it. So I go and do just that. I unlocked my iPhone so I could go from one legitimate carrier to another in a different country because I moved and I had to Jailbreak and Unlock to do so. If all the paid apps dissappeared because of that I would be hopping mad and on the phone with Apple immediately to tell them how stupid the policy is.

That’s just me. Think about amatuer developers who use their daily phone to test their apps. They just got shanked!

In both cases the customer who is doing somethig legitimate would be run over for the sake of defeating pirates. That is bad business.

Also, DRM has never worked and will never work because it can either be stripped eventually, or it’s so invasive that you are essentially paying the company to decide what you can and cannot do on your comouter with your property and eventhat will eventually be hacked.

Long live honesty, death to DRM.