When I got a new iPhone 4 a week or two ago, I offered my old ATT “Tilt” smartphone to son Jesse. It’s 3-year old technology, but better than his old “dumb” phone. Potentially he can store the numbers he wants to remember (all 5 of them), as well as calendar reminders which is handy for his college classes. He doesn’t want to pay the $15 for the minimum 200Mb data plan. We figured we could just put the SIM card (a fingernail-sized card that stores the phone’s network “identity”) from Jesse’s old phone into the Tilt, but that didn’t work. So, we took the phone to the local ATT store, and had them switch his phone number over to the new phone, replacing the SIM card in the process. That was fine until ATT decided that since he now had a smartphone he also had to have a data plan, and automagically added the data plan to his phone. It took another trip to the ATT store to straighten that out. Apparently whenever the SIM card is changed in a smartphone, it cues ATT’s systems to add the data plan.
When I was using the Tilt, I had installed an application called “Walking Hotspot” that turned the phone into a mobile “hotspot”, that is, it served as a WiFi access point serving up to 5 wireless devices, and using the cellphone internet access. This was really handy, except that it ran down the battery on the Tilt. Even if I had the Tilt plugged into the charger, it would still discharge the battery. I couldn’t leave it turned on all day, but rather had to just connect long enough to download email and maybe do a little research on the web. That wasn’t very practical except in emergencies, so I had bought a USB broadband card for my laptop last September.
The new iPhone 4 has “hotspot” capability also, at least so the ATT salesperson said. What they didn’t tell me was that activating the iPhone 4 hotspot requires a $45/month data plan. I’ve found they tend to leave out little details like extra costs, to do this you need that which costs, etc. It turns out in this case that it’s a better deal than what I had. I was paying $35/month for 200Mb on the broadband card, plus $15/month for a 200Mb data plan on the iPhone, for a total of $50/month to buy a total of 400Mb of data access. The $45 plan was for 4Gb of data (10 times as much), and eliminated the need for the broadband card. That’s assuming the iPhone hotspot doesn’t burn the battery like the Tilt did.
One little trick I did with the iPhone hotspot is to set Ann’s iPhone to use the WiFi hotspot on my phone to access the internet. So, when we’re together, instead of burning her 200Mb data like we did on that first iPhone road trip, she uses some of my 4Gb data allotment, and saves hers for when we’re not together. At home both phones use our home WiFi of course.