This might be true but I am not so sure. I'm afraid to turn on the antenna though because if anyone has text messaged me since I left, I will receive them and be charged a large amount (correct? - or will that only be if I open them?).
Can anyone confirm airplane mode disabling GPS?
With AT&T, when you are overseas, you will pay to receive text messages what you pay to receive them in the US. If you don't have a text plan, you'll pay, I think it's 20 cents per message, just like in the states. If you have a text plan, it'll come out of that bucket. If you have unlimited texts, you don't pay anything for incoming text messages. All outgoing messages are 50 cents each. If only phone calls worked that way....while I was in the UK, I paid $1.29 for an incoming call from an elementary school principal who called the wrong number, thinking I was the parent of a child who apparently curses like a sailor while at school.
In regards to GPS overseas, I just got back from London and Berlin and I couldn't get it to work at first. When I arrived in London, I had the London A-Z map on my phone and with data roaming off and WiFi off (but I wasn't in flight mode and was roaming on one of the networks over there), the app would never pick up my location with the GPS and would fail. While walking around London on my first night there, I just happened to find the Regent Street Apple Store (I swear to god I was not even looking for it. I was trying to find the nearby HMV to pick up some Blu-Rays I couldn't find in the US. I think Apple users have a homing device built into their brains). So I went in there and was going to use a computer to find where HMV was, but since all computers were taken, I took out my iPhone, jumped onto their free WiFi and used Google Maps. Using WiFi, Google Maps located me in a second or two, and then from there on out, London A-Z had no issues locating me with the GPS. Once I got to Berlin, I had the same locate issues with the Mappity Berlin application, so I jumped onto the hotel's WiFi network, it located me almost instantly, and then once I turned WiFi back off, it could locate me with GPS.
GPS units take awhile to get a fix if you turn it off, fly halfway around the world and turn it back on. I even flew from St. Louis to Cleveland, not very far away, with my Garmin nav unit so I wouldn't get lost in the rental car and it took forever to get a fix once I landed. My iPhone thought I was still in St. Louis, so it was trying to get a fix from the GPS satellites that should've been orbiting over St. Louis at that time. It didn't know I was in the UK and to look for those satellites. I think the iPhone location services give up too quickly on the GPS and says it can't locate you. But, once it has a general idea of where you are from using either WiFi or cellular triangulation, the GPS is much quicker since it knows which satellites to look for.
