Category: Apple

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.

T-Mobile is offering a big deal. I called yesterday to cancel my wife’s BlackBerry data plan (unreliable, but we suspect the phone is the problem) and they told me about two deals:

1. Two-line unlimited minutes Family Plan for $89.98 per month. Whoah. That’s $10 less than a single line Unlimited Family Plan and $20 more than a 400-minute two-line MyFaves family plan ($69.99); the same as a 1000-minute MyFaves Family Plan and $30 more than a 700-minutes (non-MyFaves) two-line Family Plan. (All of those comparison plans have unlimited Nights+Weekends.)
2. Transfer a line of service from another carrier (not prepaid) and get $135 credit to your T-Mobile account in 15 days.

So this got me thinking about an iPhone again.

After a lot of calls to T-Mobile and one or two to AT&T, I decide to get a 3G iPhone 16GB at Wal-Mart and transfer it to T-Mobile and upgrade to the unlimited minutes Family Plan. We’ll be paying a lot more than we pay now monthly but I can use the phone for business. It’s unlimited.

I bought the iPhone today, called T-Mobile, transferred it, then called AT&T. The nice AT&T lady, Deborah, told me if it doesn’t work out I have 30 days to come back to AT&T with no hard feelings and no fees. Wow!

I now need to get my iPhone working on T-Mobile. I only expect to be able to get EDGE working, not 3G, but I think that’ll be okay for me.

Also, T-Mobile has a free overnight shipping deal this week so I’ll have my Nokia 6263 tomorrow. (I had to pick a phone anyway. Two year commitment with this deal so why not get the free phone?) My wife picked out the phone. She can use it when she’s bored of her BlackBerry.