I've had Cingular unlimited for a year or two on a Treo 650. The basic plan (national roaming, and a bunch of minutes with rollover) is about $40/month, then the unlimited data plan adds $35, and with a few text messages (which are extra charge) added on top my monthly bill is about $80. I got a big discount on the Treo650 for a two year commit to this. The SIM card does work in other phones, I have used it in a Treo600, Nokia 6682 and have no doubt that it will work in an OpenMoko or homebrew phone.
I use the internet a lot from the Treo, it's EDGE speeds, good enough for keeping up with a lot of email, google maps and basic browsing, although its slow. Coverage in the SF Bay Area is good enough and has been gradually getting better over the years. I had T-Mobile for a while, and had worse coverage but much better customer support. I hope this helps, Adrian On 3/9/07, Erik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I agree that this should be in a FAQ somewhere, because it's something lots of US free-your-phone users need to know. It isn't OpenMoko specific, but definitely relevant. I already wasted ^H^H^H^H^H^Hspent some time looking in to this so I'll share what I've found: 1. I believe Cingular prepaid can do GPRS data. This would normally be excellent news. Except that its $0.01 per kbyte. [!!!] If you get the max bitrate that works out to something like $4 per minute! So "spending minutes" to use data would be a bargain. 2. But I'm not holding my breath that I will be able to just spend voice minutes getting infrequent data access from a prepaid plan. A cellular telephone voice connection is extremly highly compressed in ways that sound ok for speach, but ways that mean very little data would get through if you tried to use standard modem codings. Plus, the little cpu in the thing couldn't really be expected to do the decoding. Perhaps someone could do a great hack with a self-powered modem on the headphone port, looping back into the unit via a bluetooth-to-serial dongle. 3. Data plan it is. You can't add a data plan to a prepaid card. So either you have a prepaid voice card + data plan card, or you suck it up and sign up for a voice plan as well. 4. Cingular differentiates plans based on what kind of phone/interface device you have, and how you intend to use it. The cheapest is smartphone, the next is pda, the next is laptop. And to use one of their locked smartphones or pdas as a bluetooth modem you have to pay an expensive extra $$ per month "tether" fee. My guess is that all data plans work in all unlocked devices... but maybe I'm wrong and theres a whitelist on the simcard. 5. It seems to be a grey area, using a phone that they don't provide. I can see a good argument for calling the OpenMoko a SmartPhone. Which is great 'cause theres a $20/month unlimited data plan for smartphones. But there's no way to limit whether you can use it for tethered/laptop data access so who knows if they'd want to slap the tether fee on you. "just in case" fortunately I don't think they're that clue-full. 6. It seems that you can only order a plan [get a sim card] with a phone. That's not such a financial problem if you're just getting a cheap voice plan, because there are lots of cheap/free after rebate voice phones you can get and not use. But to order a data plan from Cingular [of any of the tweleve types] you have to order a phone that is valid for that plan. 7. So to get a SmartPhone unlimited plan [$20/month... unlimited data not bad imho] you'd have to also buy a smartphone. [$150] There's a $100 rebate on the cheapest phone, but who knows if you'd actually get the rebate. And who knows if it'd actually work in the neo. 8. I'm not even sure that you can have a data plan without a voice plan. Seems like at the very least you might not get the smartphone rebate if you don't get the rebate. Good luck, please share what else you find! You are indeed not the only one trying to figure all this out! -erik ps. A reasonable default, if you need a phone right now, is to buy a cheap prepaid phone and use that for the couple months until it becomes more clear exactly what plans work with the neo in the US. That way you're not locked in... and you have a sim that you can use for voice testing at the very least with the neo. That's what I'm going to do when/if my 4year old phone [on sprint month-to-month/no contract all its life] croaks before i get a phase 1! _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
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