I've been to Europe and Asia in the last 18 months, and bought local SIM cards for my ATT Tilt (a mobile Windows phone) in countries, and got vastly lower calling rates in those countries, not to mention a local phone number. I unlocked my Tilt by owning it 3 months with ATT, and calling up their international support and asking for the unlock code, which they gave me.

The revenue lost by ATT was about zero, because if they had not unlocked my Tilt, I would just have bought cheap phones (which would cost less than a small amount of roaming time) in those countries and thrown them away when I returned to the the US. The whole thing of not unlocking iPhones is silly, people have signed a 2 year contract.

Of course Apple is in business to make money. I am an old hippie with very progressive leanings and so am sympathetic to that argument.

HOWEVER! I DO believe that things are not that simple. There are many motivations here. I think that the over riding motivation of Steve Jobs and of Apple, os to provide a great experience for the end user. (and to make a profit while doing that.)

In oder to provide the best user experience, it IS necessary to protect the user from malware. It is a great annoyance to have your computer immobilized by malware or a buggy program, It is another to have that happen to your phone. It could even be life threatening. People use their phones to cal 911, not their computers.

So, I – for one – see value in the App Store model. As for the fee they take – they are providing a service which at 30% many consider very cheap. And for the free Apps? 30% of 0 is 0. It seems like a grat plan to me.

The problem would arise IF they should be denying programs to the App store on any criteria other than security (or perhaps quality). Why don't these programmers just write their programs for the App store? There is already (I believe) one VOIP program. Let's see if these other ones come along or not.

Peace all!

In order to do that, to

Don't be fooled by Apples propaganda. Apple says it's the carriers that want the phone locked down and i'm sure there is some truth to that, but Apple has always been anti-competitive with it's direct competitors. For example I can play apple encoded (ACC) music via windows media player but Apple doesn't let me play WMA (Windows media) on an ipod. I could add tons more to this list but this is just a simple example.

Don't be surprised if a many useful apps never make it on to the iTunes app store do to Apples anti-competitive actions.

P.S. I own a iPhone and a mac. Mac fan boys fail to see Apple as anti-competitive but they are.