i have a little question
 

a friend of mine wants to order an iphone from the apple store, the question is if he orders them from the apple store can he activate it in any service provider or is he forced to have a contract with at&t?

i went to the site and they have two prices one with a little 2 and the other has nothing the small letters tell me the little 2 its the one that needs the at&t contract but i'm not sure. has anyone else bought one there?

I have an ipod touch and I'm waiting for Google to do the rest.

I'm pretty sure you need to "jailbreak" it to use a different carrier.

I think they constantly patch it to make unusable with other carriers as well.

If he orders it directly from apple it probably has firmware 3.0 or newer. I think they are up to 3.1 now or something. Anyway after 3.0 I dont think you can jailbreak them to be on other carriers anymore. However I could be wrong and there is probably someone out there somewhere who has succeeded.