A quarter of Iphones are hacked

MORE than a quarter of iPhone owners are heretics to the word of St Steve of Cappuccino and are running their phones on networks that do not have his blessing.

St Steve has moved heaven and earth to make Iphone owners use the locked in contract with AT&T and yet it seems that a quarter of them have ignored him and unlocked their phone.

Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi had a look and the sales figures for both Apple and AT&T. He reckons that more than 1.45 million phones were "missing in action" at the end of 2007.

About 480,000 have been stored by AT&T as inventory but that means that there is about a million or 27 percent of sales.

Either a quarter of Apple iPhone users are incredibly careless and lost them, or they have unlocked them so they could work on non-AT&T networks.

Apple has sheepishly admitted that the number of unlocked phones was " significant". Other analysts think the figure of unlocked phones is about 20 per cent.

However, it makes the whole locked in model, which Jobs' Mob dumped on the telcos a farce.

If Apple reaches its sales targets, but loses carrier payments then it will lose shedloads of profits.

Sacconaghi said that the high numbers of unlocked phones will make it hard for Apple to lock in any phone companies in similar arrangements.

But Apple is in a bind about policing the agreement. Apple is usually pretty obnoxious to its users, but running an update that closes a quarter of its products down is taking the Nintendo.

More here. µ