The no-nonsense guide for travellers to using an unlocked iPhone with AT&T USA
Scenario: you (like me, a month ago) are going to the United States for a trip. You have an unlocked iPhone you can use with any carrier world-wide — but you are confused by the lack of a “sell me an iPhone SIM card” option on AT&T’s Byzantine website. You want to make your phone work with a minimum of hassle. You’ve looked at various sites and guides but you’re still confused. You want the ability to make a few short calls and have a decent amount of mobile data for Google Maps and TripAdvisor and Yelp and other touristy things. Here’s what you do.
Before you travel
Buy a SIM — you want an “AT&T GoPhone SIM card”, which is almost certainly available from eBay, wherever you may be in the world. I paid about £6 each for two (one for me and one for my wife).
Activate your new SIM — once you have the SIM card in your possession, go to AT&T’s website to activate it. You’ll need two numbers: the one on your SIM card, and an IMEI number. This is a special unique code that all GSM mobile phones have. Now, this bit is a little tricky. If you use an iPhone IMEI, AT&T is going to fail the activation with a mysterious message, because for some unfathomable reason it doesn’t want iPhones on GoPhone. You need to get hold of an IMEI that isn’t from an iPhone — perhaps from an old phone you own, or from a friend’s. It doesn’t matter what number you use, it’s not going to lock the phone or make the SIM only work in that phone or anything like that.
IMEI numbers are usually on a sticker under the battery and will be displayed on the screen if you dial *#06#. Once you have these numbers, complete the registration form on AT&T’s website. Once you’re done, you’ll be told your new phone number — make a note of this.
Choose your plan — there are two obvious choices for a short trip to the US. If you expect to be using the phone for fairly extensive voice and/or SMS messaging, the “$2 Daily Unlimited Plan” gives you unlimited minutes and texts for $2/day. Just like it sounds. On the other hand, if you don’t think you need the phone much, the “10¢/minute” plan charges (surprise!) 10¢ per minute for calls and 20¢ each for texts. The latter plan is probably a better deal for tourists. I’ll discuss data billing in a second.
Cut it down — if you’re using an iPhone 4 or 4S, you need a microSIM, but you (almost certainly) have a mini SIM instead. You’ll need to cut it down to fit. I used a SIM cutter like these ones, but you can do it with a sharp knife if you’re careful.
Buy calltime credit — I used CallingMart without any problems, but there’s lots of alternatives. You’ll need the new AT&T phone number you were allocated at activation and a Paypal account or credit card. Note that sometimes with CallingMart, the first order on a new account goes through a manual verification process, so you’ll need to allow enough time before you travel to do this. You want a “AT&T GoPhone Prepaid Wireless Airtime Minutes Refill” and you probably want $35 of credit (so, $25+$10). You can use AT&T’s official site but it’s fiddly to register for, demanding a lot of details like your address and whatnot.
Just before you leave
Get an APN profile — again, you’re Not Supposed to use GoPhone with iPhones so when you turn it on your iPhone isn’t going to know how to talk to the network for data. We can fix this, though. Go to unlockit.co.nz on your phone, not your computer. Select “Custom APN”, “USA”, and select the “AT&T” profile. There’s lots of variant options there, like “AT&T (isp.cingular)”; the one that worked for me was plain “AT&T”. Tell the site to email this profile to you and file that email away on your iPhone for later.
On the plane
Change SIMs — pull out your usual SIM card and swap the AT&T one in. Obviously your iPhone should be in Airplane Mode during this process!
After arriving
Power up — turn your phone back on or turn Airplane Mode off, depending on how you had it deactivated. You should soon see your iPhone register on the network, and an “AT&T” logo appear at the top left. At this point you have voice and SMS service, but no data (yet).
Buy a data package — dial 1 (800) 901-9878 and navigate through the voice menus to “buy feature package”, “buy data package”. AT&T offer three fixed data packages: $5 for 10 MB, $15 for 100 MB, or $25 for 500 MB. If you’re planning on using your iPhone normally, you probably want the third option; if you’re on a budget or a very short trip you might be able to get by with the middle one. Once you buy the package, the data will last for thirty days.
Install profile — go in to your email and find the one you sent yourself from unlockit.co.nz. Tap the file attachment and confirm that yes, you’d like to install this file.
Test your data — if it doesn’t work, you probably need a different profile from unlockit.co.nz. These things seem to change sometimes so my advice will probably not work forever. You’ll have to find some Wifi first though, to get the phone online and download the profile. If you want to hedge your bets against this, you could email yourself all the different AT&T profiles ahead of time.
During your trip
Check your balance — dial 611 at any time to check your cash balance. Say “check my feature packages” to check how much of your data package is left.
Top up — if you need to, you can buy GoPhone credit at most major grocery stores.
After you come back
Swap the SIM — on the plane on the way back, swap back over to your normal SIM card.
Delete the profile — on your iPhone, go to Settings | General | Profile, click the AT&T profile, and click “Remove”. This puts your phone settings back to how we found them.
Keep the AT&T SIM — you can probably reuse it on your next trip. Depending on how much credit you put on it might even still be valid — the maximum $100 top up lasts for an entire year.
(Hat-tip to Nik Fletcher, who wrote a guide that served as the basis to mine. I’ve added a few small extra things over his notes, like emailing yourself the profile and the AT&T automated customer service numbers.)
What if I already have a GoPhone handset?
If (for whatever reason) you already have a spare GoPhone handset, and you want to prise the SIM card out and repurpose it in an iPhone, you’ll have to jump through some extra hoops because the SIM will be locked to the handset it was sold in. However, you can get AT&T to unlock it for you. My pal Guillermo has written a short guide on how to get this done.
On cell phones, “silent” mode, and alarms
A story about the iPhone’s mute switch not turning off the alarm sound has somehow become big news, with both John Gruber and Andy Ihnatko weighing in on a debate about exactly what the mute switch should (or shouldn’t) do.
The furore has baffled me, because as far as I can remember, this isn’t even vaguely new.
For example, consider the manual for my beloved Sony-Ericsson T68i:
Even if you have set your phone to silent, the alarm and timer signals ring.
This was common to most or all Ericsson and Sony-Ericsson phones of that era.
It’s also true of Nokia. In fact, as a few people reminded me on Twitter, almost all (or all?) old Nokia phones would even sound the alarm if the phone was switched entirely off. From the Nokia 3120 Classic manual, for example:
To use any features in this device, other than the alarm clock, the device must be switched on.
So why are we now surprised that the iPhone works the same way? Consider this scenario: the iPhone mute switch does, as Ihnatko wants, silence everything. I want to use it as an alarm clock with the phone on charge on my bedside table (a not-uncommon desire, I believe). I’ve done this with every cell phone I’ve had, back to 2000 or so.
So: if Ihnatko has his way, I cannot mute the phone or my alarm will not sound. I am forced to leave the phone’s sound on and be woken up multiple times a night by beeps and gurgles as I receive Twitter messages or spam emails and what have you. That’s clearly not what I want, and as it’s not how any cell phone I’ve ever used has behaved, it’s also not what I expect.
I’d say Apple has it just right in the current implementation.
ITProPortal: “iPhone 5 To Use Bluetooth 4.0 Rather Than NFC?”
[Bluetooth low energy] compares positively with other industry groups’ standards in that it doesn’t require any additional infrastructure, and we suspect that it could even be used to rival NFC (Near Field Communication).
Just like Thunderbolt, Apple could singlehandedly decide to pioneer that technology against all the odds, as the rest of the competition (Google, Nokia, Samsung) has already embraced NFC. Rather than using two separate chips, one for NFC and the other for traditional Bluetooth, Apple may use only one; the same also applies for initiating higher speed connections for heavier traffic. This more elegant solution would save space, decrease power usage and allow peripheral partners to slash their time-to-market.
“Apple goes its own way against the entire industry” is an attractive punchline, to be sure. But Athow completely glosses over the inconvenient fact that (at least here in Europe) tens of thousands of retailers already have NFC-equipped payment terminals, under the Visa Paywave and Mastercard PayPass brands. Even my little provincial Welsh town now has several different companies using them.
It seems highly unlikely to me that Apple could convince those retailers to replace all those terminals again to support a shortwave comms format that only iPhone users could use. Apple stands alone on many things, it’s true, but sometimes you just gotta interoperate with the rest of the world.
Oh, and don’t forget Betteridge’s Law of Headlines too; not to mention the “could”, “maybe” and “perhaps” usage that litters Athow’s post.
More on the iPhone location tracking thing
(If you missed the story, I wrote about it for TUAW yesterday.)
Lots of bloggers this morning are linking to this piece by Alex Levinson, a forensics expert who (it turns out) wrote about the consolidated.db tracking stuff in a book published last year. Levinson quite rightly calls out the more hysterical “zomg the sky is falling” posts about this tracking thing as being rubbish, mostly by pointing out that this isn’t new or secret, and that the data isn’t centrally collected anywhere.
(An aside: I hope my own post didn’t fall on the wrong side of that; personally, whilst I find this logging a little disquieting, I don’t think it’s the end of the world, and that’s the tone I was aiming for.)
However, Levinson seems to have a bit of a problem with the original researchers, Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan:
While forensics isn’t in the forefront of technology headlines these days, that doesn’t mean critical research isn’t being done surrounding areas such as mobile devices. I have no problem with what Mr. Warden and Mr. Allan have created or presented on, but I do take issue with them making erroneous claims and not citing previously published work. I’m all for creative development and research, as long as it’s honest.
However, from Warden and Allan’s FAQ page:
Why did you open-source this code, won’t that make the problem worse?
We did hesitate over the right thing to do in this case, but when it became clear that “Individuals familiar with iPhone forensic analysis will be quite familiar” with it, as Ryan Neal puts it and that at least one other person had tried to alert the public but apparently failed to make it clear what was going on, a demonstration application seemed the lesser evil.
Warden and Allen never claimed they were the first to discover this, only that they independently re-created the result and felt it desired more publicity than it had so far seen. That position doesn’t warrant the serious accusation of “dishonesty” Levinson is making.
The fact that iPhones log everywhere they’ve ever been does make some people uncomfortable; it has, as Andy Ihnatko said in a nicely worded post, “the Ick Factor.” As such, it’s good to make people aware of this — I think the reactions across the blogosphere yesterday confirm that few people knew about this, notwithstanding Levinson’s previous work in the field.
As such, we should be thanking Warden and Allen for bringing this matter to wider attention, not calling them liars for claims they didn’t make.
[Thanks to @TeaWithCarl for pointing me to Levinson’s article.]
On Color’s v1.1
If you’ve missed the brouhaha, Color (iTunes link) is a seemingly trivial little iPhone app that shares photos you take with people nearby. It’s mostly famous for having raised a quite staggering $41m in VC funding.
Early reactions have been all over the place, but mostly scornful or at best baffled, and appear to have pushed the company quickly into defensive mode. Their CEO, Bill Nguyen, has done an interview with Mashable touting how they will be fiddling with the feature list soon to address complaints — a little desperate sounding to be doing that on launch day, in my opinion, but there you go.
Something Nguyden said struck me as odd though:
The former Lala CEO told me that his team has heard the criticism loud and clear, and is moving fast to make changes to the app to fix its biggest problem: that people feel lonely when they use the app all by themselves.
In order to get value out of Color someone else has to be nearby using the app. “Otherwise it’s going to make no sense,” he told me. So the app will feature two major changes when the next update ships: you won’t be able to use the app if nobody is nearby, and Color will be changing the distance required for somebody to be considered nearby.
So… how does the first person in any given area get started with the app, then? Do we need to wait for people from out of town to stop by and use Color before we can take a picture with it? Does it spread across the planet from techno-hipster hubs like San Franciso like some sort of iPhone-borne STD?
