is it possible to take a virgin US iphone and activate it in the UK on the o2 network? Without unlocking. Basically, the above board process of getting an iphone in the UK, using the official provider, but instead purchasing the hardware itself in the US.

The question applies to coming the T-Mobile contract in Germany and other places as well. Can someone purchase the iphone in one place and setup the contract in another?

No one knows yet, its a case of wait & see.

The US AT&T phone comes with specific settings for their network pre set into the phone.

I imagine that there are a number of ways they could stop you from doing this...

I'll keep my fingers crossed for you though....

I was wondering this aswell. I guess you'd have to somehow get an 'iPhone' O2 Sim Card to replace the AT&T one that came with the phone, then maybe iTunes would just pick it up as a UK one and you'd be able to activate through O2 that way.

I was thinking of phoning O2 up to see if they would send me a Sim Card.

you could also get a cheap plan with o2 .uk, t-mobile .de and a cheap phone with sim. put the sim in the iphone and reactivate? then sell the original phone on ebay or what have you

I would imagine O2 would have a list of both serial & IMEI numbers belonging to each Iphone shipped to them by Apple & if your not on the list your not getting in!!

The phone its self knows which network it belongs to, if you put a O2 sim in an AT&T virgin phone then it will tell you its an incorrect sim... it did when I put mine in before I unlocked it...

I spoke to the O2 people just last week, the girl told me that they are only selling the phones & taking nothing else to do with it.... you might need to get an unregistered sim from another source...

I would say it's not going to work. US phones are locked to AT&T and UK phones will be locked to O2. I'm willing to bet the UK phone will have a different revision of the firmware.

They'll both probably be 1.1.1. But the UK phone will have UK dialling strings, UK keyboard and the Itunes store on the phone will most likely default to a UK store (although on that you can probably change it like you can on a PC/MAC).

It's funny you should mention the music store as I've not thought about it before but I bought a song from it the other day on my USA iPhone and I live in the UK. The store is all in £0.79 format for me aswell. I think it takes the setting you have in iTunes and mirrors it on the phone.