iPhone in Thailand!
This morning I had a delivery from Fed-Ex, nothing unusual about that except this one had kept me awake at night in anticipation since I placed my order on eBay.com for my sim free iPhone.
I won’t go into the nitty gritty of how much this sucker cost me, but let’s just say that it was expensive by any standards, especially when you consider the cost of shipping. My real concern was that It may be intercepted by customs, I have had that happen before and It takes all day to get it sorted as technically your need a licence (costing 1500 baht) to import communications devices. No problems with customs getting my iPhone today.
I should point out here that this iPhone is unlocked, most of the ones on eBay are locked to AT&T which would not work in Thailand at all. It cost more than a standard iPhone, and I should say here that I have no idea at all about how to unlock a iphone, either for use in Thailand or elsewhere.
Like all Apple products the iPhone is very nicely packaged, it’s obvious from the start that this is a very high quality product.
I slipped my AIS sim card into the iphone, switched on and after a moment and an impressive startup I now have a working iPhone in Thailand.
I’m going to play with setting up my email, browser etc. I have already made a couple of calls to check that it’s all working and it seems to me to be very high call quality indeed.
One problem that I need to get sorted is that my AIS prepaid sim charges me 1 baht per min for data transfer, this thing seems to be using the data connection all the time so I need to get that changed to an unlimited plan, perhaps DTAC will be a better option.
Saturday, July 7th 2007 at 3:29 pm
Update by Author.
Well, I have been trying without much success to get email and data working, though the phone and the ipod side work just fine. I switched to DTAC for the unlimited data but still no data.
The seller said that it was because I need to manually edit a file to update my APN, username and password for DTAC data services.
I found a utility that does “OTA” (Over The Air) setup by sending a service message as a special kind of SMS, but it does not seem to do anything.
Surely this cannot be part of a “Lock”, as unlocked phones just don’t work for phone calls and not data, do they?
Tuesday, July 10th 2007 at 3:32 pm
Hello.
Contact me on boythanh (at) gmail (dot) com, i may be able to assist you in getting your APN set up correctly. If your phone works ok on the D-TAC network, it will also work on D-TAC’s GPRS, no need to change any “file” in the phone.
You are correct, a n”lock” will always be either a “SIM lock” (only one specific SIM card can be used) or a “network lock” when any SIM, but only for one specific carrier, can be used.
Hutch has some success in blocking data access for phones not sold by Hutch, but then Hutch is CDMA (i’m a Hutch user) and things are different in CDMA. And besides, if you manage to get a “truly open” CDMA phone (such as in China, Unicom’s CDMA phones are completely open) and you happen to have the details for Hutch’s access (such as IP addresses etc, Hutch won’t give them to you but you can, provided you have knowledge, “hack” a Hutch phone to get the details) you can use Hutch’s data services as well
For D-TAC, which is GSM, it’s a hell of a lot easier.
Best regards…
Thanh
Tuesday, July 10th 2007 at 5:55 pm
Would you please share the locations and URLs of the utilities and stuff you use in this endeavor? I too have an iPhone in Thailand, and would like to use my SIM card in it. You seem to be ahead in that regard, which is confusing, as most ‘unlocked’ phones sold on eBay only allow use of iPod features and WIFi features, but are clear that they do not allow phone features, or other SIM switches.
If you now use some OTA utility that no one has ever heard about, I would appreciate if you shared your sources, so I could play with that as well.
Otherwise, contact me on my Thai mobile (you don’t seen to have any sort of contact link on your blog, at all) - zero-eight-nine-518-1620
Thanks!
Wednesday, July 11th 2007 at 4:07 am
Harry,
For OTA provisioning use SMSNOW which is a PC based utility that allows content delivery and service message, including OTA setup.
Download it here (60 day working trial):
http://www.nowsms.com/downloads/smsmmsgateway.htm
Note that I am not in any way connected with the manufacturer, I first used this more than a year ago to send WAP games to my own mobile phone over the air and discovered than that it supports very comprehensive OTA stuff.
I’m fairly OK with setting up APN’s, the one that works for everything else with DTAC is http://www.dtac.co.th with no username or password. I suspect that the iphone in it’s current implementation is having trouble understanding the lack of usename/password as AT&T and most all US SP’s have a username/password even though its the same for all subscribers.
The seller of my iPhone has actually been very helpful, I suspect now that my iPhone is some sort of pre-production version and I have just sent it back for test and/or replacement as I’m starting to think that it’s actually faulty.
I’m thinking about going over to a Samsung i600 (blackjack?) which is fully supported in Thailand until the iphone is officialy released, so my iphone may well be up for sale in a week or two.. If only I could get the data working it would be perfect.
Monday, October 1st 2007 at 6:40 am
Just got an Iphone.
Everything perfect.
Just one question. What to input in the EDGE settings ? I’m using AIS.
Thanks