iPhone + T-Mobile = Yum




My Rebel Simcard arrived yesterday, while in was in Clearwater. I came home, took a big nap and then played with it.

Got the data and voice working on my iPhone. Carrier is T-Mobile (USA).

Called T-Mobile Customer Care to downgrade my $25.00 unlimited data + 400 text messages plan to their $10.00 100MB data plan. T-Mobile’s “Nick” (male) mentioned that I’d lose those text messages (I’d forgotten) and offered their 50MB + 200 text messages plan for $10.00. Yeah! I had him set it up this way. Cool guy, very helpful. He reminded me why we’ve stuck with T-Mobile all these years. Nick also told me — I asked — that there’s no terms of service problem with tethering. Before I asked, he was telling a story about how he was setting it up himself recently.

Now I have to decide if I want to keep the unlimited minutes plan. Seems to me that any lesser plan won’t save me significant money, unless I go down to prepaid. Ick. Then I won’t have a data plan and won’t be able to use the iphone tethered as my backup internet option, which is a big part of my cost justification for the iphone. So prepaid is out.

And if I ever need to use the iPhone as a backup internet source, I can call T-Mobile and temporarily turn on the unlimited internet plan. Nick mentioned this on his own but I was thinking of it myself.

So now the only questions that remain are:

– Should I wait for the next-gen iPhone (if they release one in June, alongside the iPhone OS 3.0 release)? Screw it. I already bought this one. It’s very good. Big improvement over the iPod touch in some ways. If I get sick of it, I can sell it.
– Should I switch the two-line T-Mobile unlimited minutes plans to two unlimited minutes plans? It’ll cost about $10 more total per month. But if either of us don’t want the unlimited minutes in the future, the other person won’t have to lose theirs. Thinking about this, I don’t see myself dropping this since I’m going to want iPhone data forever. I’m pretty confident of that. So let’s just keep them together in one unlimited plan and save the $10/month.