Within a matter of hours of the new iPhone becoming available in the United States this summer – and long before customers in Europe could buy it – IT specialists in Ukraine were already proudly demonstrating the device. Some asked American friends to send an iPhone over, while others bought one in the US or picked it up online.
Kyiv leads the charge
Just a few months following its official launch, you can buy your own metal-and-glass touchscreen handset, with its built-in two-megapixel digital camera and iPod at nearly every Internet or mobile shop in Ukraine. Prices range from USD 750 to USD 1,100, which is twice as much as the US or Europe. And there’s another catch - it is also technically illegal, as Ukraine has yet to secure a licence for the phone, which in the few countries it has been released is electronically tied to a single service provider. Although official European distribution of Apple’s new handset was scheduled for October, Ukraine was not on the list of countries deemed important enough to get their hands on this latest small object of desire.
As with almost all forms of software-based locks, the iPhone was hacked almost immediately, allowing the handset to be used with any SIM card - and not just those Apple wants to foist upon consumers. “We computer nerds set about unlocking the iPhone together, and we did it,” trumps Yevhen Kuzmin, a technical novelties fan, who runs a small company dealing with media and TV equipment. He claims to have been the first in Ukraine to unlock the iPhone, adding that it costs around USD 50 to unlock the device.
“There are shops where you can buy any mobile phone from any part of the planet. These handsets are often sold as second hand to bypass legislation which would otherwise block their sale, although anyone can see that they are brand new,” explains Oleksandr Ivanyk, editor of the Kyiv-based weekly mobile technology magazine Sota.
Piracy fears isolate Ukraine
Officials sales have not been scheduled for Ukraine because the country’s mobile providers cannot yet offer access to Apple’s iTunes music download service nor has the US computing firm secured any agreement with a local operator, explains Ivanyk, who remains sceptical than a deal will ever be reached.
“Making a deal with a Ukrainian operator is not a problem, but it is not in Apple’s plans largely due to piracy in the music market and a lack of customers willing to pay for music,” he adds, referring to Apple’s expectation that the iPhone would be a major driver of traffic to iTunes.
There also remain structural problems in the way people use their mobiles here compared to existing trends throughout the rest of Europe. “The main difference between the European and Ukrainian markets is that our markets are dominated by prepayment services rather than contract services. Anyone can buy a cheap mobile phone via a contract with any given operator and then unlock the phone by paying a local expert to do so illegally. Our customers are not ready to remain loyal to one and the same operator for the duration of a contract. This is one of the main obstacles which hamper the Apple iPhone’s official release in the Ukrainian market,” explains Ivanyk.
Fashionable or functional?
For the foreseeable future Ukraine’s image-conscious technology junkies will have to make do with unlicensed versions of this latest mobile must-have. “The device is so elegant that people tend to ignore the lack of such obvious features as multimedia messages, Bluetooth, EDGE and more. The new iPhone is more fashion accessory that a multifunctional handset,” says Ivanyk.
Kyiv users would appear to agree. “It has a cool screen but no 3G. The e-mail functions are good, but there are no copy/paste or forward functions. It is more of an overloaded handset that a truly smartphone,” sums up Kuzmin, who nevertheless concedes that he is more than happy with his iPhone.
