JEDDAH, 27 September 2007 — A Saudi software developer says he’s over halfway done with a project that would provide Arabic-language support to Apple’s much-hyped mobile phone. Though the product is not officially available outside the United States — and won’t be available directly from Apple until next year — some Saudis have found ways to unlock phones that they have managed to obtain either in the local marker (at a steep premium price) or by having them shipped by friends in the US.
Yusuf Omar, a network consultant in Jeddah in his 30s, told Arab News that he and his team are almost 60 percent done with a project that would provide Arabic-language support.
Omar says his work on developing Arabic-language support should be considered an Apple customer’s own initiative to make the phone accessible in Saudi Arabia (and perhaps to Arabic speakers worldwide through the Internet). He is not, he says, subverting Apple’s system.
“We are not hackers, we are developers,” Omar said, adding that his project also involves allowing the iPhone to use Unicode and Windows’ own language support for Arabic script.
Bandar Abouras, a twenty-something Saudi, was so excited about the iPhone that he not only managed to get one shipped to the Kingdom but also spent hours surfing Asian websites and translating instructions laden with technical jargon in order to get the phone working. His efforts paid off when he inserted a SIM card and the phone booted up with the word “Mobily”, one of Saudi Arabi’s telecom providers. (The unlocked phone can also be used with Saudi Telecom.)
“I bought it through an American friend who shipped it to Saudi Arabia for me,” Abouras said. “I spent six hours experimenting and translating the instructions until I finally unlocked the device.”
Although Apple Inc. has yet to unroll the phone into the global marketplace, the phone has been appearing in different places outside of the United States advertised as functional with local telecom providers.
Officially, the iPhone is only available to function with AT&T inside the United States and is about to be released to the European market. Right now, if the locked iPhone is used outside of the US, the signal will roam until it resolves with AT&T. Americans that have taken their iPhones abroad have been surprised to discover that the iPhone automatically connects with AT&T’s network to check email, resulting in unexpectedly high phone bills.
Now that the unlocking software has been developed and released online by a number of individual developers, anyone in the world can buy the locked unit and install the software, which will unlock all the features of the iPhone, including allowing non-AT&T SIM cards, in less than four minutes.
Shortly after its official release earlier this year, the iPhone began appearing on vendors’ shelves in Saudi Arabia. A couple of Apple resellers claim that initially there were customers paying upwards of SR20,000 ($5,333) for the phone. Today the iPhone can be purchased locally in the Kingdom for SR4,000 ($1,066) for a locked phone and SR6,000 ($1,600) for an unlocked one. Recently Apple announced a $200 price reduction, making the recommended retail price of the product $399 in the US.
Omar, the software developer, said that Saudi consumers are still unaware of the benefits of e-commerce, noting that it would only cost less for someone to buy the device through the Internet and simply download the unlocking software. “Despite this, people are still buying the device from the local market for more,” he said.
Abouras added that he didn’t like the way Apple seemed to be ignoring the global demand from its customers with such a US-centric rollout of a product that officially can’t be used except with one US telecom company.
“We Mac users around the world consider ourselves a loyal family to Apple,” he said. “This move has offended us.”
There might be a downside to the use of third-party cracks to the iPhone, however; Apple announced earlier this week that any software updates would likely render the cracks (and iPhones using any network other than AT&T) useless at least until the next round of cracks start appearing online.
