I just happened to have an unused iPhone 3G sitting around in my office closet. It was once my work phone, back when my VP thought it would be really cool if we ordered a whole bunch of iPhones for the office. But the plans eventually proved too costly, so my employer asked all the users to either ditch their current [work] AT&T plans (where my company would just suffer the buyout costs) or take over the contracts. The end result was a bunch of unused iPhones sitting around. In most cases, when employees terminated their AT&T contracts, they were told to just keep the phones.
There it sat in the back of my closet for months. Lately I've had some extra time on my hands, so I thought I would explore the iPhone's capabilities as a stand-alone wifi gadget, playing games on it, basically using it as an iTouch. First I did the jailbreak thing and began installing all sorts of third-party applications that were banned from the iTunes Store, for whatever bureaucratic reasons Apple could drum up. And there are some cool apps out there!
Then I started reading about the compatibility of iPhones on the T-Mobile networks...and I got intrigued. All I had to do is "unlock" the iPhone and get a new sim card. But what about the phone rates for a non-T-Mobile phone, especially in the data plan area?
I called T-Mobile twice over the phone and got two different responses. One gal quoted me some ridiculously astronomical rates that didn't coincide with what I had gathered on the net. The other rep quoted me a rate that was cheaper than I was expecting! So I headed down to my local T-Mobile store.
Chrissy, at T-Mobile, had no idea how I got quoted such a low plan. It was $10 cheaper than she could calculate, no matter how she cut it up. I told her that I already spoke to two T-Mobile reps earlier that morning. She checked my account and there were no new notes posted to my account. (Funny how that happens.) I convinced her to call up Customer Service- they should have my account timestamped proving that I made contact with the reps. No new timestamps! Unbelievable!!
But Chrissy was determined to get to the bottom of things. She must've spoke to four supervisors before figuring out how I got that quote. With all the new year's rate changes, information wasn't available to store employees on how much micro-management could be done to the plans. She gave me a new sim card, I popped it in the phone and right away, the phone told me that it was activated on T-Mobile!
Apparently, the phone was registered to activate three weeks later, so she had to have someone back that out and get it activated that day, and that took FOREVER! All in all, I was at the store for over two hours! and Chrissy had a phone stuck to her ear for almost the entire time! In the end, I got my 1500 minute Family Plan and it only cost me about $30 to add the iPhone with phone and Internet, but no texting.
Although the iPhone isn't compatible with T-Mobile's 3G network, the Edge network is very functional. It's almost as fast as AT&T's 3G. I got it done, just in time to beat the release of Google's new Nexus One. We'll see how that fares.
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