In an interview given to Indiatimes,
Airtel's IT director Jai Menon claimed that the Airtel version of the
iPhone 3G is hacker-proof and even the most talented hackers on the
planet won’t be able to crack the iPhone’s Airtel applications with other SIMs.
Airtel claimed that even if a hacker manages to get another provider's SIM card to work with on Airtel iPhone 3G, they would still be locked out of Airtel-specific applications like Airtel Live and mCheck,
With no access to Airtel Live they wont be able to access any text,
audio, video, static images, music or gaming options available on the
preloaded Airtel Live portal.
It's very surprising to see Airtel locking their iPhone's even when
Indian customers are paying Rs. 31,000/- (~ US$715) and a fully working
unlocked iPhone (non 3G for now) from grey market is easily available
under Rs. 24000/-, being a Airtel customer myself, I would suggest
Airtel and their tech team to invest more efforts in improving the
quality of their service instead of making such non-worthy statements
as nobody is going to put efforts in cracking this pricey iPhone just
for using Airtel Live.
BTW, I guess it should be pretty easy to flash the Airtel iPhone OS with original iPhone firmware and get rid of Airtel crap from it.