For those of you not lucky enough to get an invitation to iPhoneDevCamp, all I can say is that you really need to sign up way early next time to be sure that you can get in. But you also need to watch the main iPhoneDevCamp site. It seems many did not show, and anyone and everyone was welcome.

iPhoneDevCamp2 was really a great event here in San Francisco. We were connected to the satellite camps via video link, and they looked like they were having fun too. In the case of the SF meeting, we had free food and beer. Nothing makes code come together more than good food and really great beer.

The best part of the event for me was being literally surrounded by iPhone dev experts. It is great to be able to get an answer for a question just by asking the person next to you vs. my usual method of researching on the web for hours.

The end result was not quite what I wanted, but I did make much headway. For example, I and another camp attendee (who shall remain nameless to protect him from any AT&T or Apple wrath) did a small experiment to see if I could figure out a way around buying an iPhone without the 2-year long AT&T contract.

A little background on the experiment. My phone is currently on the AT&T network. In fact, my SIM’s card is actually an old Cingular card, but it works fine in my phone. I had already tried to buy just the iPhone without the contract at the Apple store in Palo Alto because the Internet said that I could buy the iPhone without a contract for $500. The clerk informed me that the Internet was wrong (can you believe it?). The future plans call for letting people buy the iPhone without a contract, but it is not happening yet. No one really knows when (or if) it will.

So after spending much of the day browsing 3G iPhones on eBay, my fellow camp attendee decided to test if I would really be able to use my SIM card in an activated 3G iPhone. We converted a bit of marketing swag (a metal button that you can pin to your shirt) into an unofficial iPhone SIM extraction tool. Replacing his SIM card with mine, we found that the iPhone insisted on being activated by the iTunes store before it did anything. This was really disappointing since the iPhone will, at least, surf using WiFi without any SIM card whatsoever.

The result of the experiment is that I will have to get the iPhone with contract or buy a iTouch and wait for the iPhone to be made available without the contact.

Tags: Apple, AT&T, iPhone, iPhoneDevCamp, iTouch, SIM card

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