Hong Kong now officially has unlocked iPhones for sale – legally. Apple seem to have taken a different tack in the country, where usually it insists on tying the phones to an official carrier.

The International Herald Tribune said Apple had announced the move on its Hong Kong Web site, citing Apple saying customers can now “buy directly from Apple” and not be tied to one specific carrier. In Hong Kong, the phone currently retails for HK$5,400 (US$695) and the 16-gigabyte version costs HK$6,200 (US$798). Only recently only Hutchison Telecommunications International customers had access to the iPhone, and tied to a two-year contract. Like most Southeast Asian countries, the phone is readily available in the gray market.

Why the sudden move to ‘free’ legal iPhones from contracts, when it had been happy enough to keep phones locked? Perhaps the phone isn’t selling quite as quickly now as Apple would like and in the Southeast Asian market, where gray market phones are available everywhere, this would be an opportunity to sell more units. The legal iPhone is an attractive proposition in Hong Kong. Not only would the legal iPhone cost much the same as a gray market phone, it would not rely on hacks that might turn the phone into an iBrick once a new firmware update comes out.

What phone makers need to realise is that the mobile markets in each country differs. Sure, selling unlocked iPhones in one country opens the risk of those phones being sold in bulk overseas, instead of to the local market it was intended for. But there is a market for unlocked phones and plenty of customers who will refuse to either be tied to pricey data contracts, or to switch carriers just for the iPhone. Locking a phone to a carrier might work in countries like the UK and the U.S., but it’s not a model that is popular in others. It’s been proven that Asian customers are willing to pay full price for a phone, just for the privilege of carrying it. Apple should probably look into ‘freeing’ up the iPhone in more Asian countries, lest customers decide to go for the just as pricey but far more available competing models such as Samsung’s Omnia or HTC’s smartphones.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 6:57 pm under International, iPhone.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
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