Pondering pay-as-you-go for iPhone data? Might want to think different

Sure, you can put your iPhone on a pay-as-you-go SIM and take your data a few cents at a time... but be warned, you may end up with a substantial chunk missing out of your wallet without noticing that you're leaking cash. TUAW tests the plan and shows us the bill.

I recently had the chance to sit down with my iPhone and a prepaid SIM with a $50 account balance. I really got a chance to see how the iPhone would function with a pay-as-you-go plan and its data plan.

What I learned was this: although using iPhone with pay-as-you-go means you can make occasional phone calls when you need to, you'll want to avoid EDGE data and stick to WiFi whenever possible. Here's the complete run-down.

Activating the iPhone

Getting the iPhone to activate with the new SIM took longer than I expected because I was using an updated version of iASign and I forgot one basic rule: You need to deactivate your phone first before trying to reactivate it with another card. This cost me almost a half hour of frustration until I finally remembered.

A paperclip let me remove the old SIM and swap in a new one from a cheap disposable Motorola phone. Then I used iASign to deactivate the iPhone(./iASign.mac --deactivate), to check the state of the iPhone (./iASign.mac --state, which should return deactivated), and then to activate (./iASign.mac --automatic iPhoneActivation_private.pem). You may wish to use its backup feature before doing the deactivate/reactivate.

Read the whole article @ TUAW

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