Just wondering, when the phone is eventually released in Europe I am presuming that (unless its 3G) the hardware will be the same and Apple will use a unified firmware and starting from a revision in the near future would accept (in locked state) both AT&T and 02 (or T-Mobile in germany, or Orange in France) sim cards? Or do you think we'll start to see variations of firmware for each territory?

Or is it possible their will be subtle hardware changes or firmware changes which makes EU phones different to US phones and thus the unlocking procedures differ as well?

It would be easy to implement some change in the EU phones that kills off the unlock.

For instance put another FW version on it (1.1.1 speculations anybody?), and not allow 1.0.2 or alike FWs which are vulnerable to the exploit the unlock uses.

I highly doubt 3G, T-mobile did report on it though.. Along with 16gb of HD space. HD upgrade seems likely (considering iPod Touch). But 3G has been talked over and dismissed by so many analysts. BUT, we will know soon enough (this week)

But do you think there'd be a firmware for America and a firmware for Europe? Or would there just be one firmware which would need to allow sims from AT&T, O2 and all other 'official' carriers?

what I suspect is going to happen is that it will be a unified firmware file but somewhere hidden in there will be one little line that os like region=2 or something to denote the different carriers. It would then just be a matter of time efore we found it and were able to change the value reboot the phone andrhe entire thing would be re branded for that carrier aswell as the baseband being set to take a different sim.
and personally I wouldn't mind if my phone were locked up again if I just had a carrier in my region.

My thoughts too. I've purchased an iPhone which I'm planning on unlocking but if I ran into troubles or Apple relocked the firmware and it proved trouble to re-unlock, I'd be ok with using it locked on o2 in the uk.

I don't think they will regionalize the phones. It's basically a small computer, with OS and hardware and everything. My guess is they will run it the same way they do their computers: One product name = one product in all the world.

There are some problems with this way though.. You wouldn't be able to update baseband in all phones (worldwide) if some of those phones were simlocked and others not. However I don't think this will become a problem for another year or so.. As far as I know England/Germany/France doesn't have laws making it illegal to sell simlocked phones, so these wont be a problem. And nobody knows anything about when the iphone will roll out in the problematic european countries (mine included! ).

But I'm desperately hoping for 3G, 16gb, same FW, FW update to 1.x that bring international keyboard... etc.
A fools hope

It will come, eventually