My wife is going to be making a rather sudden trip to the US next week and I'd like to stay in touch with her. My brother has said she can use his old iPhone 3GS, but it isn't connected to any provider right now.

Since I've been away from the US for over 3 years, I don't really know what's going on in the mobile world these days. Can I do the Wal-Mart "straight talk" plan for just one month? Do you just buy the sim card right there at Wal-Mart and walk out with a working phone? Do they have the micro sims that will fit in an iPhone? Anything else I should be aware of? I just want to make this as painless as possible for my wife as she'll have a lot of other things on her mind.

Dunno about Wal-Mart, but if the phone takes SIM cards, then yes.. insert the newly purchased SIM, and walk out with a working phone.

It's possible that the SIM will require "activation" of some kind (carrier dependent), which I imagine can either be done "in store" or "over the air" with the phone itself.

Cheers

Won't that phone be locked to AT&T?

Note that a 3GS uses a mini SIM or 2FF

(not a micro SIM / 3FF)

Not quite. Straight Talk operates on either T-Mobile or AT&T's towers depending on what SIM you buy. Both types work in unlocked phones, of course, but the AT&T network ones will work in AT&T locked phones. Same deal for T-Mobile network SIMs.

However, if you have an iPhone, it will detect the Straight Talk AT&T SIM as an AT&T SIM and remove your access to change APN settings. This is what happens when you have an iPhone with contract AT&T service. Straight Talk has different settings. So, when you walk out of the store, only calls will work. Data and MMS will not. To get those working you can go to http://www.unlockit.co.nz from your iPhone when you get on WiFi. They'll push the settings to you.

If you get the T-Mobile Straight Talk SIM, you will have access to change the APN settings on the device. However, you won't have the same coverage and 3G speeds will only be in areas where HSPA+ was refarmed to the 1900MHz band. Of course, your iPhone must be unlocked.


Yes


Some Walmarts are stocking SIMs. Both regular size and micro are available in the AT&T flavor. I believe the T-Mobile ones are only regular size at this time.

If your Walmart isn't stocking SIMs, you can go to Best Buy and pick up a NET10 SIM. It's the same deal and same parent company that runs Straight Talk. The monthly rate is $50 rather than $45.

The 3GS uses a normal sized SIM, not the smaller ones in some current phones. PIC.
Straight Talk is an AT&T MVNO, and others networks, but their relationship with AT&T might be going away.

If the phone was not an AT&T iPhone (I don't recall which carriers had the 3GS, but I think AT&T were the only SIM capable carrier with the iPhone then), that it will not work with an AT&T SIM, as it will still be carrier locked. Your BiL can get it unlocked as it is out of contract (it takes a week), which he should probably still do so your wife has carrier portability, either now or in the future.
She should be able to pick up a pre-paid SIM at any AT&T Wireless store, and put $25 credit on it, which will expire in 30 days. Note: This will give her 10c/minute calls, and 20c/text, but no data - so disable data on the phone.

When I tried Straight Talk a few months ago, the local Wallmart did NOT have just SIM cards. They only had the phone packages.

I had to order the SIM card online and have it delivered.

Since I had a 4S at the time, I also had to get the correct SIM card size. There are adapters to fit the smaller cards into the older phones, and large cards can be cut down to fit the newer phones.

Certainly I would want to have the 3GS unlocked. Not only more flexible in terms of usage, but somewhat better resale value on the iPhone.

As I said, some Walmarts are stocking SIMs.

The phone is no longer under contract, so he's going to call AT&T tomorrow and see if they'll issue an unlock code (is that possible with an iPhone?)



Noted. Thanks.

I've unlocked iPhones by calling AT&T and doing an internet chat. By far, the chat was the easier of the two. However, you can now simply submit a form. I would try the form first, and do it ASAP. It can take a couple days to process the unlock with AT&T and Apple's systems.

When unlocking an iPhone, you don't get an unlock code like with a normal phone. The lock status gets changed in Apple's systems and requires you to restore the iPhone through iTunes to unlock. Backup your phone before you do this since the restore will revert the phone to a factory-fresh image.

That's what I said - a mini SIM size 2FF in your picture.

There's no way you say any size is "normal" these days.

Your right, "normal" was a bad choice of words, how about "traditional"? In any case, this is why I included the link to the picture for clarification, as I find the mini/micro/nano description to be lacking in clarity, and was not aware of the form factor (#FF) naming scheme.

Tangent: Where are full-size SIMs (1FF) used?

They used to be used in phones, just like the others. Now they are used for delivering 2FF, 3FF and 4FF SIMs to customers

I vaguely remember that my first mobile, a Motorola MR20, used a 1FF SIM card. I think my Startac might have done as well.

For those who've never seen a 1FF in use:



You used to slide the whole credit card sized SIM into the phone.

(from this "review" of a Motorola 7500)

Gar! I waited too long to get an AT&T compatible Straight Talk sim. Is shelling out $50 on Ebay my only option?

Anyone got one they aren't using?

T-Mobile only has 2g coverage in my area.

EDIT: I just bought two Net10 AT&T sims just in case they stop selling them also. It looks like it's a wash going with Net10 anyway since they have a family plan that makes the price the same as what it would be with $5 savings with Straight Talk

They're the same company, no need to bother getting a straight talk one.

There is an invisible data cap of roughly 2GB a month (going by people who have gone over around that and posted about it on the internet) with either, so be careful. Word is you usually get away with it once by making a phone call, the second time they just kick you off. I've never hit it, so I don't know.

On Net10, the cap is no longer invisible. It's plainly laid out as of this month.
http://net10data.com/

On Straight Talk, the cap is still a mystery for those that have AT&T SIMs. T-Mobile SIMs on Net10 and Straight Talk appear to be truly unlimited.

Meanwhile, T-Mobile has announced their new tariffs. They're making much ado about their new subsidy structure, and elimination of the otherwise standard two-year contract. If you dig deeper, they also appear to continue to support their much-cheaper prepaid tariffs, which leads you to wonder why anybody would prefer the "normal" tariffs to the "prepaid" ones. I seem to recall that the prepaid ones don't support the necessary feature to forward your voicemail to Google Voice.

Sigh.

My Verizon lockin will continue until December. Then I have to resolve whether it's worth sticking around, given that I have one of the grandfathered no-asterisk unlimited 4G data plans.

Prepaid doesn't include data roaming on compatible carriers such as AT&T.


Dial 611 from your T-Mobile prepaid SIM, ask them to disable voicemail on your account. Done.

Due to other life things, my cell phone decision was postponed a bit, and I'm glad. During my roadtrip from Austin to Seattle, I had a friend with me using AT&T prepaid. I'm still on a "normal" AT&T plan, and the coverage difference even in voice was noticeable.

I still want to switch off AT&T, so I may go to T-Mobile on their normal new contract free plans. Dumping a subsidy plan, while still retaining voice and data roaming will probably work best for my situation. Especially since voice coverage will be critical as I explore the PacNW by motorcycle over the coming months.

Those new T-Mobile plans resemble the plans we have in Canada from Wind Mobile and Mobilicity, the two larger "small carriers" up here. Good all-inclusive cheap plans, BYOD friendly, and with a device subsidy plan (Wind only here). Downside here is more limited coverage compared to the Big carriers.

I dislike a lot of things about AT&T, but their coverage on contract plans is impossible to beat*. I primarily use AT&T because it's very reliable and I don't pay for the service which is $102/month for 600 minutes, 1000 texts, and unlimited data (throttle at 5GB).

I keep my $30 T-Mobile SIM active because I pay for it, and not my work. Both my AT&T and T-Mobile SIMs are tied to my Google Voice number. I can swap SIMs at will, and nobody would know but me. And, in the unlikely event I leave my job, there isn't going to be any sort of worry about suddenly switching providers or getting new service.

I do make use of the T-Mobile SIM for about a week every month. I do it just to gauge if coverage has improved, or if I'll be in troublesome AT&T areas such as NYC. I'm happy to say that some of the 2G towers in my area have been upgraded to HSPA+ over the past few months, but most of Orange County is still EDGE. I wish T-Mobile the best, but all of AT&T's much larger network has been HSPA+ for years now. Seeing EDGE or GPRS service on your phone is a real downer in 2013.

I can't comment on how well T-Mobile postpaid accounts work with data roaming, but prepaid is pretty bad. They claim you can roam at 2G speeds only and I heard you get a maximum of 250MB per month, but the speeds are terrible. They're so terrible that you might as well not have data roaming.

Another thing that T-Mobile fails at is international roaming. Last time I checked, they wanted $10/MB in Canada and $15/MB in the rest of the world. By contrast, AT&T allows you to buy a bucket of data ($30 for 120MB) which works out to $0.25/MB. Of course, it's always going to be cheaper to get a local SIM. But, for short trips, it's easy and cheap enough to just buy a bucket from AT&T and drop it when you get home.

Overall, I could live with T-Mobile prepaid if I had to. The price has a lot to do with what makes it bearable.

*Among US GSM carriers (I won't ever consider Verizon or Sprint until their base service is LTE and swapping a SIM is the only thing I need to do to switch devices)

Am I correct in assuming that Net10 or Straight Talk will mirror AT&T prepaid coverage then?

The map on the website looks pretty good for my area and much of the east coast. I think I'll take my chances.

TracFone (Straight Talk, Net10, etc.) has their own roaming agreements. This is why their coverage map for GSM-T (T-Mobile) is more attractive looking than T-Mobile's own prepaid coverage map.

So, you're basically getting AT&T prepaid coverage supplemented by TracFone's roaming partners. Coverage on Net10 should be better than AT&T prepaid.

With some of the new-generation chipsets from Qualcomm and the like, it now becomes possible to build a truly universal world phone. CDMA here, GSM over there. LTE everywhere. The only restriction, I suppose, is how many different antennae (and the associated op-amps) that you want to cram into the case.

That make it at least hypothetically possible for an MVNO to allow for roaming across all four US carriers, or for the carriers to roam across all of their peers. Today, MVNOs seem to be targeting the low-end price-sensitive market, rather than the "damnit, I want high quality service everywhere" market, which currently seems stuck with Verizon.

We'll see.

That seems to be the major challenge now, as shown by 4 different versions of the iPhone 5, who knows how may different versions of the Galaxy 3/4, and other high end phones. The iPhone 4S was nice, as it had just one model, simply because it didn't have to deal with the LTE frequency mess.


CDMA still seems to be a limit here, though I'm not sure if it's technical or just carriers being stubborn. Even though the 4S had only one model, there was never a way I found to activate the CDMA part unless it came from a CDMA carrier. LTE may help with it's support of a SIM.


I'm amused this seems to be a popular consensus that I've never been able to agree with. I don't know if it's just chance or what, but for my needs, AT&T has always offered better coverage. My parents house, AT&T works, Verizon and everyone else, 0 signal. My new job where people rave about Verizon, 1x coverage/1 bar and dropped calls, AT&T HSPA+ and no call issues. My Austin apartment as well had much better AT&T coverage. I will say I am seeing overloaded AT&T network like coverage in parts of Seattle though, making me ponder a switch. But with the work situation, it won't be to Verizon.

*edit* I will give Verizon credit though for an excellent LTE roll out. During my trip, I did have multiple times where my iPad was happy on LTE coverage while my phone sat on AT&T Edge service. Verizon (and Sprint) needs LTE much more then AT&T and T-Mobile though, to make up for the poor CDMA 3G speeds compared to HSPA 3G.

I'm on Sprint now and about to finish my contract in a couple of months, so these T-Mobile changes come at a very good time. My wife's on T-Mo (non-prepaid, about a year left in the 2 year contract) and I don't see it roaming very much around here if at all.

My distaste for AT&T and my desire to avoid another contract means that the only choice for me is whether I go with the new "simple choice" plan and add my wife to it later, or just go prepaid until her contract is done and then re-evaluate things at that time. It sounds like the only real drawback of prepaid is the lack of data roaming, which shouldn't be an issue. T-Mo doesn't have LTE here and probably won't for some time, but their 4G service on my wife's phone is faster than what I usually get from Sprint, so I'll take it.

I haven't run the numbers on prepaid vs. simple choice yet, but will probably do that this weekend. My wife has virtually no data usage and I generally average a bit under 1GB/mo, so the 2GB family plan is probably where we'd end up if we go with the simple choice non-prepaid plan. (It's a bummer that they don't pool the data usage on the family plans, since I could probably get by with the cheaper 500MB plan if it was 1GB between the two of us.)

Yeah, the simple plan may well be simple, but it's still not ideal. I'd be far more impressed if the marginal cost of adding another phone/tablet/whatever was super cheap (say, $5/device), but everything had a shared pool of bits. That way, I can add all the devices I want and use whichever one happens to be at hand.

Roaming without a roaming charge usually doesn't present an indication it's occurring. In the distant past, the carrier tag would change, but it's now all hidden. (I remember driving in Kansas with my Voicestream phone, and seeing some odd local carrier names pop up over a decade ago).

The only way on my recent road trip I knew I was on a roaming network was when my friends prepaid AT&T phone would switch to "Emergency only" mode. Had his phone not been around, I'd have no indication anything was different.

Make sure to check the coverage maps carefully when considering prepaid vs other options. Had Rob not issues that same warning here before, I'd have been completely unaware there was such a drastic difference.

Sure, the pricing isn't as competitive as I expected given that T-Mo is so far behind the others, but they've probably calculated that they don't have to undercut the big guys by a lot to start siphoning off business. Or perhaps they don't want the large influx of new customers that would come with even cheaper plans, since that could overload their existing network.

On my phone and my wife's (CM10 Spring and CM9 T-Mobile respectively) there's an "R" next to the signal strength indicator when it's roaming. I'm sure T-Mo's coverage map will be inferior to AT&T or Verizon's, but all it has to do for me is be better than Sprint's, since there's no way I'll go with either of those carriers.

A tangentially related question: I also need to get a second phone in addition to the free-ish iPhone.

I'd like to get a ruggedized phone because my wife seems to break pretty much everything electronic that she touches. I'm also trying to keep it as inexpensive as possible. So far, my best option seems to be an unlocked Motorola Defy+ for $129 on Amazon and then upgrade it to Jelly Bean by installing CM10. I've got absolutely no experience installing modded firmware on a phone, but the write-ups online don't look difficult.

Any problems with this? Any better deals or better supported phones I should consider?

Perhaps a tough case/shell for the iPhone?

A friend of mine bought a Samsung Rugby, for reasons much like what you're talking about. He decided that he didn't like Android and is instead planning to go with an iPhone + some sort of hard case.

Broadly speaking, if your plan is "buy phone X only to strip it and reinstall some other OS build" then you're asking for a world of hurt, since most Android phones have various hurdles between you and installing that third-party firmware.

If you can wait until mid-May, you'll see what Google's "X Phone" is all about. I suspect it might be quite attractive. We'll see.

Maybe a Sony Acro S!

Thanks for the suggestions. That Sony does look nice, but at $400, is a bit out of the price range. It'd be nice to not have to root and hack something though.

You could give the Blu Tank 4.5 a try. It's not necessarily rugged, just waterproof. Though, I think the Acro S isn't terribly rugged either.

I wouldn't count on much 3rd party ROM support with the Tank.

Now we're talking. That's much closer to my price range, especially since it's already running Jelly Bean. Great suggestion.

EDIT: Except no 1900 mhz band. They claim make a version of the Tank with it, the w110a, but they don't sell it on Amazon, or seemingly anywhere else.

Bummer.

I saw some unboxing videos on Youtube where the box for the W110i said 850/1900/2100 3G. Of course, this contradicts every spec out there, so who knows what to believe.

PSA: Straight Talk SIMs for the AT&T newtork are available again

Thanks for posting about this. I'm not sure I could live with the data caps for Straight Talk or Net10, though.

I wanted to update something you said earlier in this thread, Rob. As far as I can tell, Net10 is back to not indicating anywhere on their site what the cap is. The only thing I could find was something buried in their TOS that says AT&T SIMs would be capped at 1.5GB.

It still astonishes me that every carrier is able to get away with their bastardization of the word "unlimited." It's absurd.

Well, I've got one of those "grandfathered" Verizon "unlimited" 4G plans. The other day, I was trying to push a 600-ish MB file from my laptop to home through a tethered link. It got to about 120MB and the connection died and I had to wait a few minutes to resume. Verizon has some kind of serious throttling going on.

Ah..the beauty of prepaid. I can switch at the end of the month!