The $23/month iPhone | Hacker News Reader

The $23/month iPhone

mediumjones.com

59 pointsvaksel10 comments

I tried this kind of thing last November when I bought my G1, putting it on a GoPhone account instead of using t-mobile. The biggest problem I had was the lack of 3G (which is t-mobile only on the G1), since once in a while my phone would decide it needed to download, for example, an update, and there went all my bandwidth and all my minutes, too (and I was never allowed to get 100MB for $20; the most I could ever get was 10M for $15). So, last month, I broke down and went with a month-to-month plan at t-mobile, and since I can get unlimited data while paying the same as I was paying on a GoPhone account, I'm happy, and I don't have to nervously check my minutes every day and put my phone into airplane mode near the end of the month, etc.

If you really don't have the money, this could be worth it, but a similar thing was months of stress for very little savings, for me.

Some friends of mine (and myself) had a different approach. 5 of us all have iPhones sharing 1400 minutes, unlimited data and texts for $62/month/person. It's 5 guys who aren't big talkers and with rollover we never come close to running out of minutes (we could probably step down in minutes but we keep them just in case).

Hello $23/month iPhone, meet my normally priced iPhone that has functionality.

I mean this is novel and could have its uses, but most people would want data for the additional $20/100MB and throw in some more for texts, and at that rate you're pretty much at normal prices.

When I had my iPhone 2G on a data plan I was burning through a clean 1GB a month without even trying (the Maps feature is pretty killer)... This plan would not hold up for anyone who wanted to make real use of the data features.

It's not novel, really. People have been using other operators around the world since shortly after the iPhone release.

I can pay less than $23 and receive as many calls as I want for a year on my iPhone. That's not in the US though.

I have a SIM card for one country where I need to pay about $1.5 a month minimum if I don't spend at least $9 worth a month. It's pre paid. Text messages are ~ US 3.5 cents each. About 8 cents a minute for outgoing calls. You don't pay for incoming calls. Data is about 90 cents per MB.

What kind of functionality do you think is missing?

This doesn't seem very special. Where I live, you could put a pay-as-you-go SIM card from O2 (the iPhone's network, so no unlocking needed) into your phone and add "unlimited" internet access for about £7 a month.

I don't have an iPhone, but I buy a £10 (~$15) top-up monthly, which gives me 300 free SMS messages. Then I use £7 of that top-up to pay for the monthly internet add-on. I have £3 left for calls and other random usage and if I need more, I just add more that month.

or you just use a so-called turbo sim card that tricks the phone permanently into thinking it's on the ATT network. then you don't need to do any software hacks later on (or be shut down by future updates from apple): http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/08/turbo-sim-add-on-a...

Did you actually RTFA? Or, even the article you posted? From your link: "The unlocking process is still a bit complicated and requires SSH on your iPhone"

So you still have to jailbreak your phone. And really, this article is only tangentially related to jailbreaking. It's about using the iPhone with Skype and a GoPhone plan.

No the article's title is how to use an iphone for 23 bucks a month and not how to use an iphone with skype.

Being able to insert a pay-as-you-go SIM card is front and central to the plan here, or you are forced into a full cellphone plan. That implies either the turbo sim card hack or a soft unlock.

Further, insinuating that i have not read the article or neither the link that i have posted is quite annoying. The topic is not easily answered, because with Firmware upgrades by Apple it's a cat-and-mouse game. Over a longer period, the most quoted solution that I have read about is the Turbo SIM hack.

The Turbo SIM card hack was popular with first generation iPhones (and made big press in previous years; I recall the company Bladox from Czech Rep. was featured a lot). That's about when I read up on this topic. Recently though, it stopped working with the Firmware 2.2, which is when this software hack from Yellow Sn0w worked... with 2.2.1 and beyond soft unlock doesn't work anymore, and it's apparently back to turbo sim - see: http://www.edmartechguide.com/2009/03/research-before-you-up...

For further info, from iPhone Hacks, O'Reilly, April 2009:

Hack 47. Unlock Your iPhone with a SIM Hack

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You can use a locked phone on a different carrier with a physical hack to the SIM card.

As mentioned in Section 45, the second method of the anySIM software hack changed the baseband so that any MCC/MNC pair (used to identify a cell network) portion of the phone's IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) would appear to be a valid pair. Even if you can't successfully hack the baseband—for instance, on a 3G iPhone—there is a hardware method for doing the same thing.

As there already existed a large market for unlocking phones prior to the iPhone, many companies were already producing solutions for hacking SIM cards. Bladox, a Czech Republic–based SIM test tool manufacturer, introduced the Turbo-SIM in 2004. This clever device consisted of a thin circuit board shaped like a SIM card, and a tiny microcontroller (Figure 7-8). By cutting a tiny square out of the plastic casing of the SIM card (which did not affect the SIM card's normal functioning), the Turbo-SIM could piggyback the SIM card, intercept its communication with the phone, and mediate between the two to make sure they "agreed."

SIM card sandwich hacks of this nature were some of the most consistently effective for first-generation iPhones, and are currently the only effective solutions for iPhone 3G hacking. As with many hacking solutions, a game of cat-and-mouse has ensued, and many of these SIM piggyback cards ceased to work when firmware 2.2 was released for the iPhone. Because the piggyback SIM has a reprogrammable microcontroller, they can be upgraded with new firmware (with the right programming equipment) to work around new problems.

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Could someone please explain me what's worth 50 points in this article? Millions of people worldwide unlocked their 2G iPhones to pay less or to use their service provider. There isn't anything new or interesting in it.

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