Now I have something to truely complain about with Apple.
My son inherited my wifes 3GS after I upgrade her to a 4S. To check if the phone was SIM locked to Optus I inserted my Telstra SIM card from my non-iphone. Everything worked OK, so I removed my SIM card.
Roll forward 24 hrs, my wife tries to send me an SMS, and complains that I dont respond. I inform and show that I never got the message. She tells me that there is something wrong with my phone as it says Delivered on her iPhone.
I send her an SMS and she receives it fine. She replies and it doesnt come through on my phone. "See, there is a problem with your phone" she says.
I investigate further by sending myself and SMS and using and external SMS gateway to to send myself SMS messages which all work fine.
Roll forward another 24hrs, conducting more tests with HER iPhone to isolate the problem. I send myself and SMS from her iPhone, PING, I hear a noise, check my phone, no SMS, strange. Send another SMS, PING, I hear a noise again, not my phone, where is the noise coming from?
Hunt around and happen to pickup my sons 3GS and see a string on SMS messages on his screen.
:ques tion:
So now comes the hard part, why the hell are SMS sent to my phone number truning up on his iPhone... without a SIM card in it? Then to make it worse why can he send messages without a SIM card?
The answer lies in Apples iMessage, which impersonates SMS as its default protocol, when you send a message Apple records your number and redirects SMS via its iMessage services. Once they have as an iPhone user it is close to impossible to get away from it.
You cant remove the association without putting another SIm card in there or doing a factory reset on the phone.
Currently arguing with Apple as to why I have to install iTunes on my PC to recover their problem.