So couple of days back I bought myself a gift and I was super duper thrilled to say the least. Four reasons made this particular purchase a soulful experience for me:
1. The Gift – I bought myself the iPhone and acquiring a “must-have-gadget” in any electronic geek’s “must-have-before-I-die” list is a good enough reason in itself to call for celebrations.
2. The Buying Process – Took me eight freaking days to win this baby and that too without exceeding my budget on eBay. I paid around $500 with FedEx delivery to NYC.
3. The Money – 100% payment made from my own hard-earned money. And my blog made a good contribution towards it. A proud moment, indeed.
4. The Birthday – The intention was to gift the iPhone to myself on the 6th and make most of the notion, “who needs love, men & sex when there’s an iPhone”.
However as it happens at times “even best laid plans fail” and unfortunately, my perfectly knitted iPlan came crashing down today early morning.
The story goes somewhat like this…
I bought an 8 GB iPhone from a seller based in Oregon, USA. The guy has more than 200 positive feedbacks and so the purchase, according to me was safe and reliable. And as I had thought, the transaction went ahead pretty smoothly. The delivery was made to NYC within 4 days at my best friend’s residence – this is my usual delivery mode for eBay purchases. I buy things online, get it delivered to NYC and she gets the stuff with her during her India visits.
So as I mentioned above, everything looked all hunky-dory; she got the iPhone perfectly packed. Even though she didn’t want to (ruin the packaging), on my insistence she opened the box and in her very words, my baby looked all “bright and shiny”.
The only issue – my baby was as good as dead.
By dead I mean, while bidding I failed to notice that the iPhone I was bidding for, was a locked version when an un-locked is what I actually intended to buy. Now when I look back at it, it’s no wonder I was able to buy it within my allocated budget. To make matters worse, the seller at his end had upgraded the iPhone’s firmware from 1.1.1 to 1.1.2 (which he clearly stated in the listing).
Now the issue here is (and this I found out via Google power); apparently mighty Apple has blocked sales of iPhones with older firmware and is shipping out only the ones installed with enhanced sim-locking features aka. Firmware 1.1.2. As of now, iPhones with pre-installed firmware 1.1.2 cannot be un-locked. But there are rumours of a hack but it’s still in testing stages.
Thankfully though God has shown some mercy on this poor soul – in order to get iPhones, which have been manually upgraded to firmware 1.1.2, to work on other networks they have to be downgraded to firmware 1.1.1. Though this my friends, looks to be a tedious process…definitely not something which can be handled by us, the ordinary folks. However on eBay there are many claiming to provide you a solution for this firmware problem @ a mere cost of $20. But since this experience has already left a bad taste in my mouth, I am pretty weary of using the above so-called ‘easy option’.
It’s so darn amusing na? My best friend will get the iPhone with her on the 3rd from US. I will have it in my hand on the 6th of December i.e. my birthday but after so much excitement, invested time and money, in its present state it can only be used as a paperweight, one very expensive paperweight.
And so my iPhone dream yet remains to be fulfilled. Re-playing this experience (for my blog) an old Hindi phrase perfectly recites my agony, “Haat ko laga par muha ko na aaya”.
Ps – If any of yous out there know of an experienced phone hacker, iPhone in particular and who happens to be Mumbai based, kindly do let me know. In return, I shall send out “your” choice of flavoured cake to which-ever corner of the world “you” reside in. Ayee Shapat!
[...] But Sakshi’s iPlan is ruined by the fine print on her eBay purchase. [...]
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