As most of you already know, Verizon is expected to announce and launch the iPhone later this month meaning AT&T will be losing its exclusivity. The iPhone will finally be available on more than one US carrier – but it will still be locked. Unlike most other countries where the iPhone is available on multiplecarriers, you won’t be able to go to an Apple store and pay full price for an unlocked iPhone that you can use on any network – or any carrier around the world with a simple SIM swap. Verizon, being a CDMA rather than a GSM carrier does not use SIM cards.

US customers instead will have the choice between two locked iPhones; either locked to AT&T or locked to Verizon, unable to move between the two, and not even be able to officially move to the other GSM and CDMA carriers in the US; T-Mobile and Sprint. Although we don’t know for sure, we most likely will be unable to call our carrier and get our iPhone unlocked, not even by paying them to unlock it. That means that if you are currently an AT&T iPhone user and you want to move to Verizon, you will have to buy a new Verizon iPhone. You can’t end up taking it with you. If you get a Verizon iPhone and decide that AT&T was your carrier of choice, there isn’t bringing your new iPhone back either.

As of right now, many who are on AT&T end up jailbreaking their iPhones and using utilities such as Ultrasn0w to unlock their iPhone to use with multiple carriers but as of right now, we don’t know if it is capable of being done with the CDMA iPhone. Although jailbreaking was deemed to be legal, it still voids warranty and won’t land you in good light with Apple. Will there ever be a time where we can walk into an Apple Store and buy an unlocked iPhone – one that is capable of working on any carrier in the US – similar to how it is in most of the rest of the world? Come this time next month the iPhone in the US will still be locked. Just locked to two carriers instead of one.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!

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Authors: _GadgetNews

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