Let's start with the good news: The Palm Pre will be Quad-Band on GSM and Tri-Band 3G. The devil's in the details, but it this case it's angels
- Palm Pre GSM Bands: 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
- Palm Pre UMTS/HSDPA Bands: 850 / 1900 / 2100
Those bands, as ToniCipriani in our forums corrected predicted, support both European and US 3G on AT&T. Cheers and adulation.
Now for the tricky part: the Palm Pre in the UK and Ireland appears to be SIM-locked and since it's exclusive to O2, a SIM-Free version won't be available. This is in contrast to Palm's own Treo Pro, which was available unlocked from the get-go. Unlocked Palm Pre: not so much.
Hackers: Start your unlocking. Everybody else, sit tight and think about how you're going to get around the fact that you must sign a contract with O2 UK in order to purchase the Pre in the first place - so that even if we get a speedy unlock on the SIM, that doesn't necessarily make it a cakewalk to import and use the Pre in the US.
The German version, however, is a bit different. It's available "SIM-Free," which means that Germans don't need to sign up for a contract in order to purchase the Pre. Big ups to O2 in Germany for their transparent pricing and plans:
With the new concept O2 My Handy customers can finance Palm Pre independent of the contract at zero percent interest rate. Customers make a down payment of € 1 in the O2 shop or online at www.o2online.de and pay the remaining sum in 24 monthly rates of € 20 each
We're also told that the German Palm will not be SIM-locked to O2. If we can confirm that, it will be good news, but don't forget that this Pre will only be available with the QWERTZ-style keyboard, so would-be importers will have to deal with that issue.
In other words, it's a mixed bag for anybody who wants a GSM Palm Pre without signing up with O2.
Update: Meyerweb makes an excellent point in the comments: The Sprint Palm Pre requires activation and a working data connection to work out of the box, otherwise you're stuck starting at a Palm Profile Login screen. We don't know if Palm's profile checks for carrier compatibility, but either way potential unlockers could be looking at another roadblock.
Update 2: Confirmed: the German Pre will be available unlocked. Thanks to everybody who let us know!
Comments
oh my. finally a good news for all us poor guys abandoned by Palm and living outside the 4 lucky ones.
qwertz keyboard won't be a problem.
now what remains? oh yep...Will o2 germany sold online OUTSIDE germany? will the german palm pre be multilanguage or at least with english language inside built in?
thank you for any info about it. =)
"...this Pre will only be available with the QWERTZ-style keyboard, so would-be importers will have to deal with that issue."
Wikipedia says the differences with this keyboard are that:
It differs from the QWERTY layout by interchanging the "Z" and "Y" keys —....Part of the keyboard is adapted to include local umlauted vowels, such as ä, ö, ü, etc. Some special symbols also have a different place, and the Ctrl key is called Strg....
So besides these differences what other issues would there be?
Is the phone going to be German language only? (Do the US Pre's feature the ability to make the language German??..that would be a clue)
"qwertz" is nothing a custom brew of webos, and a few stickers can't solve.
I wouldn't get your hopes up too high. If, like the Sprint Pre, you need to have a Pre profile with your provider, it's not going to do you much good on AT&T.
There has to be a way since the German Pre will be unlocked.
Palms own newsletter says: 'If you want to use the Palm Pre on the o2 network...'
The 'If' sounds quite... if!
Unlocked means you can use it on another carrier. It doesn't necessarily mean you can use it WITHOUT an O2 account. It may well require an O2 account to set up the profile, after which you can then pop in another SIM. As long as your O2 account is still active.
The Sprint Pre turns into a door stop without an active Sprint line of service. The O2 Pre *could* do the same thing.
I somewhat doubt it. Most of Europe has very strict laws regarding restricting phones like this. In fact in certain European countries (I think Belgium's one of them), locking phones is illegal.
And in fact there are lots of people in China who managed to get the Pre working on China Telecom.
You are required to create a Palm account. NOT an o2 account.
Right. If you can create a Palm Profile on a bad ESN Pre, it should be possible on GSM version the same (or slightly modified) way.
Palm said so in their newsletter. Its an official way.
I'll have that 'veriified' soon. Am planning on using my Pre on an other network as well.
I'm sounding like a broken record but when will Pre launch in Asia? We also use GSM so it should be easy. I would prefer Palm to upgrade the OS first though.
The Palm profile has nothing to do with the carrier. Once activation has been bypassed (which it has ) you can create a profile with a Wifi connection.
This is true, because I've created a Palm Profile using the Mojo's Dev Kit emulator and it works just fine.
Hey Dieter... Small mistake: If we can confirmED that...
I'm still waiting for the PRE in Belgium. Both SIM-lock and exclusive carrier are forbidden here. (i.e. the phone has to be sold lock-free and must not exclusively be linked to a plan of some sort).
Repost sorry
Great... Now time for the hackers to unlock them, and while you are on that can you wrap one and send it to Mexico please??? although a qwertz keyboard would not be that bad... at last the GSM pre will get out...
Great news!!!
I think the easiest way to get a Pre to another European country would be to let hackers find the way to unlock it and then buy one off ebay.co.uk
There's always plenty of guys on there that get phones as an upgrade from their contracts and then sell them. No contracts, no anything.
I've done this so many times with other phones, mostly WM ones originally sim-locked both to Orange and O2.
The only thing I'm concerned about is the Pre's build quality. Since the consensus seems to be it's not great, I wouldn't want to be left with a broken phone and no warranty.
Btw, has it been confirmed whether it's going to be 3.6Mbps or 7.2Mbps?
You can bypass the activation/Palm Profile process via NovaCom - it's not the roadblock people think it is. Once you're past that, you can pretty easily create a Palm Profile via WiFi, and once that's in, you're free.
The modem unlocking shouldn't be that hard with the level of access we have either. I would suspect you'll be seeing hacked Pres on AT&T/T-Mob very, very soon after the Euro launch.
so, whats the bad news?
support both European and US 3G on AT&T
What about T-Mobile frequencies?
"Now for the tricky part: the Palm Pre in the UK and Ireland appears to be SIM-locked and since it's exclusive to O2, a SIM-Free version won't be available."
You can buy a phone from 02 without a contract and demand that they unlock it. (UK law dictates they would have to)
I wouldnt worry too much, the Pre should be available unlocked and unbranded from many sources before long. If not, bye bye Palm, im off to buy a N900.
As stated above, O2 usually offers the option to unlock any phone for 15 GBP. Didn't know they were obliged to by law, I just knew they usually offer the option with their locked phones.
I think its a good idea that they keep it locked for certain carriers that way they have to be with them to have the pre, pixie or whatever
...and your justification behind that?
I cannot understand why Palm will not sell that great phone unlocked, available worldwide. (like all of the blackberry)
This is the main reason to success and sell millions of phones.
This is what the costumers wants.
we don't want another 'iPhone' to play 'unlock-and-hide' with Palm, we got tired from that !!
If Palm will not give that to us, we will go Android !!
I know zilch about SIM-unlocking, but would it be a plausible shortcut to just get a dump from both a locked and unlocked phone and run a Linux "diff" command (compares two files) on relevant files?
Perhaps just for fun you can do the same with a CDMA web doctor dump?
I think it's a little bit more complex than that. From what I heard, it's actually in the hardware that it's encrypted to lock the phone, not the firmware. Even if you load another firmware onto the phone, it won't clear the SIM Lock. If it was that easy I would assume there's loads of unlocks for Android phones already.
I read on a site that a method involves looking through the Qualcomm firmware to find vulnerabilities to bypass the SIM lock on startup, if there's no formal way to enter a SIM lock code.
I read the thread about Jason Robitaille's homebrew WebOS repair utility and the basic idea behind how it works. In it he details that there is currently a unique webosdoctor.jar file for Sprint phones and Bell Canada phones that you can download from Palm. This makes sense for carrier specific branding and apps. This leads me to believe that it will be the same for the GSM phones and their carriers. Some Linux/WebOS guru should be able to download those files and do a file comparison to uncover the differences between a sim-locked phone and an unlocked phone in WebOS. Create a homebrew patch, and Bob's your mother's brother.
Unless of course, this whole sim-lock business is somehow not handled within WebOS...
Goyena posted the same basic idea while I was typing.
Ban this ridiculous locking of phones and exclusivity deals!
2 year contract ? No way. Treo Pro staying in my pocket with tmobile solo sim.
Bleh. Where's the 900MHz 3G Band? Guess I can forget about getting a Pre any time soon, then. Yes, technically it will work just fine on Vodafone New Zealand's 2100/900 network, but I think the majority of the country is on 900MHz, and that's just annoying.
Sorry to bother again, some of you guys got the news about the presence of english language inside the german sim free palm pre? And any news about how to buy it from o2 (i know, maybe it's too early =) ) and shipping policy outside Germany?
Thank you in advance =)
i got my Palm Pre finally unlocked to use on any network.
i had to buy a sim chip called rebelsimcard II and cut my network sim but all is working fine and what can i say i love this Palm Pre its got to the best phone i have ever had the pleasure to use
Note that the UMTS bands stated in this article for the unlocked German Pre are completely and utterly wrong.
-- Rod
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