Re: Sim card with Internet access

At 11 Jul 2007 16:42:43 -0700 Simple Simon wrote:
> I'm a Brit who will visit USA on holiday for 2 weeks with my wife. We
> want to use our Sony Ericsson W850i cell phones with a US sim card to
> make calls within the States, calls to the UK and access the Internet.
>
> Can anyone suggest sim cards that will do these things?

Not really. The US is waaaay behind the rest of the world with respect
to international calling and internet access on prepaid SIMs.

Here in the USA, we have two national GSM carriers- AT&T (formerly
"Cingular") and T-Mobile USA. Both charge over $1/minute for calls to
the UK. T-Mo charges $0.10/min for USA to USA calls versus $0.25/min on
AT&T.

T-Mo doesn't offer internet access on prepaid, and AT&T charges $10 for
5MB of data transfer, if I remember correctly.

Mobile phone use in American is actually quite inexpensive IF you have a
contract/monthly plan. Prepaid, however, is years behind.

On 2007-07-12, Todd Allcock <elecconnec@AmericaOnLine.com> wrote:
> At 11 Jul 2007 16:42:43 -0700 Simple Simon wrote:
>> I'm a Brit who will visit USA on holiday for 2 weeks with my wife. We
>> want to use our Sony Ericsson W850i cell phones with a US sim card to
>> make calls within the States, calls to the UK and access the Internet.
>>
>> Can anyone suggest sim cards that will do these things?
>
> Not really. The US is waaaay behind the rest of the world with respect
> to international calling and internet access on prepaid SIMs.
>
> Here in the USA, we have two national GSM carriers- AT&T (formerly
> "Cingular") and T-Mobile USA. Both charge over $1/minute for calls to
> the UK. T-Mo charges $0.10/min for USA to USA calls versus $0.25/min on
> AT&T.
>
> T-Mo doesn't offer internet access on prepaid, and AT&T charges $10 for
> 5MB of data transfer, if I remember correctly.

I'm curious. The T-Mobile prepaid page has this:

Sidekick® rates
Get unlimited e-mail, Web browsing, domestic instant messaging,
and domestic text messaging for $1 per day, and spend only $0.15
per minute for nationwide calls.

What is that?

T-Mobile in the UK offers prepaid Internet access (including HSDPA) for
1 GBP per day. I always thought the above was the USA-equivalent of that.

Dennis Ferguson

At 12 Jul 2007 18:58:45 +0000 Dennis Ferguson wrote:

> I'm curious. The T-Mobile prepaid page has this:
>
> Sidekick® rates
> Get unlimited e-mail, Web browsing, domestic instant messaging,
> and domestic text messaging for $1 per day, and spend only $0.15
> per minute for nationwide calls.
>
> What is that?


The Sidekick (also known in other parts of the world as the "Hiptop,")
manufactured by a company called Danger, is a sort of Blackberry for
teenagers. A QWERTY-keyboarded e-mail/web phone that had it's 15-minutes
of fame here in the US when Paris Hilton's was "hacked into" revealing
all of her contact's info a few years ago.


It connects to a special proxy server maintained by Dangerserver that
allows access to the web, e-mail, etc.

Only the Sidekick/Hiptop devices can parse the information sent to/from
Danger's server- it doesn't work with any other mobile, like the OP's
Sonys.

Arguably, the OP could buy a Sidekick from T-Mo when he gets here, but at
$300 would likely not be interested.

Sadly T-Mo offers no prepaid data options for non-Danger devices, except
their free "T-Zones" service which is a Very small "walled garden" of WAP
sites that allow you to buy ringtones/wallpaper, access your account
balance, and access CNN, ESPN, and ABC News WAP sites.


> T-Mobile in the UK offers prepaid Internet access (including HSDPA) for
> 1 GBP per day. I always thought the above was the USA-equivalent of
that.

Sadly, no, since the Sidekick plan is a device specific plan.





--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com