I will be in 昆明 for 5 or 6 weeks stating the second week in October. I have an iPhone 3G with the AT&T plan and have yet to bother jailbreaking it.

Has anyone here had experience in using a iPhone with a local China 3G-compatible SIM card? Any advice on setting up the iPhone (jailbreaking if needed) to work with local SIM cards? Any info on the cost of a data plan, text messaging and performance of the data facility in 昆明?

Thanks in advance,

Chuck

China is a decade behind the rest of the world and is only just rolling our 3G now. The international standard WCDMA and HSDPA compatible with the iphone will only be available on China Unicom. China Telecom uses CDMA2000/EVDO and China Mobile uses the homegrown standard TD-SCDMA.

By October the China Unicom WCDMA network should hopefully be covering all of Kunming. However I have seen online that they will only allow 3G service to those signing a contract for at least 6 months, ie no prepaid 3g service. But that remains to be seen.
The iphone of course is also compatible with GPRS (2G data) and EDGE (2.5G data).
As far as I am aware China Unicom does not have an EDGE (2.5G) signal to fall back so if you are out of range of a WCDMA tower you will fall back to plain old GPRS.
Your best bet may be China Mobile after all as at least they have EDGE which is faster than GPRS and do have prepaid data packages. You just wont be able to use their 3G service because it is TD-SCDMA.

Hope some of that makes sense.

sorry, just wanted to add you'll need to jailbreak and unlock your iphone just to be able to put in a local SIM card to make calls (regardless of data packages available). That is unless you are prepared to pay international roaming charges.

Thanks for the info, I'll jailbreak and unlock the phone and go from their.

I'm also interested in how to proceed with an iPhone. To now I have been assured an 'unlocked' 'phone can be used without having to jailbreak. The latter considerably diminishes the overall function for me. I'd appreciate confirmation and any further information on the topic.

most iphones are sold locked in which case the only way to unlock is to jailbreak first.
If you're lucky enough to have bought your iphone from Hong Kong or Italy then it is probably already unlocked and you won't need to jailbreak.

Not sure what you mean by the latter diminishes the overall function. If anything the reverse is true. Jailbroken iphones can do everything a non-jailbroken iphone can do and much much more.

Thanks for the clarification regarding unlocked 'phone usage. Can a 'jailbroken' 'phone access an existing Apple iTunes account (to download previously purchased Apps) and get software updates? A full explanation would be really appreciated.

a jailbroken iphone can connect to itunes, download applications etc.

Basically you can do everything you were able to do before but with a whole lot extra. All sorts of applications, utilities etc that are not in the apple store can be downloaded through cydia but you still have full access to the official apple store.

Doing a software update will undo the jailbreak so if you need your phone to be jailbroken in order to unlock it to use on another network then its best to postpone an update until the hackers have come up with the next jailbreak fix which is usually very quick.

Currently the latest firmware update 3.01 is compatible with the jailbreak solution for firmware 3.0 but requires a little amount of knowledge to get this right.

Google jailbreak 3.01 for more info or if you are not confident doing it yourself there are loads of places in Xiaoximen that will do this for a small fee.

Hello,

Do you know if there are original iphones available to buy in Kunming?
Where can I go for a good price?

Thank you.

I have just done a bit of research at the local Kunming branch of China Unicom and have written up the latest on how to get your iPhone on China Unicom's network. Here are two detailed blog posts on the subject:

chinabites.com/[...]

chinabites.com/[...]

Hope folks find these helpful.