Dorset Freelance Website Design and Development

If there’s one thing that sticks in my craw its paying a shit load of money to use my iPhone abroad. I like to use geo-tagged items like posting in Brightkite, the exciting thing being that you can go somewhere very remote and log where you have been. Obviously I’d be expecting to pay to use this service abroad – especially somewhere outside of Europe, but at £3 / Mb this is ridiculous.
I spend a fair amount of time in France, and Ill be buggered if Im paying a £50 bill just for reading some text email and posting a few items in a blog, as they say – C’est des conneries!. So I set out to find out about getting a French iPhone or sim card or whatever. Just to solve this issue.
I came across this article in Wired magazine online, which is the meat in the sandwich. Dont get me wrong there are a lot of good articles out there explaining the situation such as Made by Many here, and ones telling you how to lower the British charges such as this in PC advisor, but what you really want is to use is a local SIM and pay local charges, balls to taking it easy, is this 1990 or 2010. So, as the Wired article says, unlocking the iPhone is the first step. In the Wired article they use a bit of software, but in actual fact I asked o2 and they said they would just unlock it for me enabling me to use a European Sim. I have to wait for it to be switched, which can take two weeks. I spoke to 02 at some length and it appears that the only thing stopping us iPhone users taking a pre paid Sim card abroad is the fact that the network companies are making a killing, and its not in their interests to publicise the fact that you can do this.
That said however I have not actually done this myself yet. Im awaiting the unlocking to go through, and I go to Paris in two weeks, so God willing I may be able to test then, but failing that, it will be July and I aim to get it working by then. Will post further items as and when I get it working.

Tags: Charges, Data, Europe, France, iPhone, Networks, Roaming

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 11:54 am and is filed under Apple, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.