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iPhone 4 on T-Mobile without a data plan
- Thread starter rodey
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I helped my FIL unlock his iPhone. He has Tmobile plan that is probably 10 years old and he pays peanuts comparing to today's prices. He doesnt have data and his texting is blocked. What I really like about Tmobile is when he went to their store they gave him free microsim card without any games to have him upgrade or add features to his plan. He was there for less than 5 minutes.
One thing what sucks is he cant activate iMessage and voicemail is weird.
Of course he is an existing customer I dont know how that works when u become new customer. I assume you will want subsidized phone so I imagine they need to recoup their losses somehow
Since Tmobile don't official support the iphone, You can go to Tmobile and just signal up. (You can also get sloooooooow 2G data).
A couple of ways to go:
1) prepaid
2) 2 year contract with value plan (bring your own phone, lower monthly rate). They will give you a microsim for your iphone.
3) 2 year contract with normal plan and get subsidized phone.
There are probably more ways to go.
All feature works except visual voice mail and 3G data. If you need help, see:
http://support.t-mobile.com/community/phones_data_devices/non_t-mobile?view=discussions
Yes but you have to be Jailbroken. And my father in law does not want to have jailbroken phone anymore. He said his 3gs would always crash for no reason. He is much happier with official unlock. Thank you for advice anyways.
My phone without a jailbreak activated iMessage without any trouble, not sure if I did anything differently.
Also you can definitely use an iPhone on T-Mobile does it. My dad, my sister and I all use T-Zones so we pay like what 5.99 a month each for unlimited snail data, haha.
Also you can definitely use an iPhone on T-Mobile does it. My dad, my sister and I all use T-Zones so we pay like what 5.99 a month each for unlimited snail data, haha.
go to walmart, buy the $30 tmo phone
sign up for the $30 a month for 100min and unlim txt + data (prepaid)
cut the sim and put in iphone ( i went to the tmo store cuz they cut it for me, they support it cuz they get $$$)
brag to your friends for your amazing iphone plan
only edge speed which kinda sucks
but no, tmobile wont force you on a data plan because if you only purchase a sim for it they wont know what phone it is.
iMessage will never work without a data plan... unless of course he wants to use it on Wifi only. If that's the case, he should be able to set iMessage up as an email only.
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They will know what phone you have once you pop the sim in. They could charge you a data plan if they wanted. The key is they don't. They don't feel they have a reason to. Another line of service that is pure profit to them isn't something they are going to decline.
The reason he can't activate iMessage is that his texting is blocked. The iPhone makes a couple of international texts in the background to set up iMessage (my understanding is that the iMessage servers are in the UK). If he were to turn on texting and allow international texting just for 1 day, his phone would automatically set up iMessage. Then he could put blocking back on as texting isn't necessary once iMessage is working.
For voicemail, he could get a Google Voice number. He wouldn't even have to use this as his number other than for voicemail. Google Voice gives instructions on how to set up so that missed calls wouldn't go to T-mobiles Voice Mail system, but rather to GV's. Then his GV app would show an indication when he has a voicemail. Of course the voicemail indicator would only push once he has access to wi-fi data if he has no data plan. I believe he could manually check for messages by calling his GV number from his iPhone. This may not be much better than whatever difficulty he's having now, so may or may not be worth trying.
iMessage works with wifi only. My son has an iphone without dataplan on tmobile and iMessage works fine with his phone number when its on wifi. When you sent iMessage to him, he just don't get it until he is on wifi. All you need to do is ability to sent international sms when activating iMessage. After its activated, sms can even be blocked.