Using U.S. Iphone 3G in Philippines?

[speekez]

Hello

My wife is traveling to the Philippines. She is wondering:

a) will her iphone 3G from the U.S. work there for phone calls and internet?

b) won't this be considering roaming and quite expensive?

if she wants to use it just for internet and not phone calls, can she set the phone to only access free wifi spots and not use the network?

Any input appreciated

 

[Skystar]

Hello

My wife is traveling to the Philippines. She is wondering:

a) will her iphone 3G from the U.S. work there for phone calls and internet?

b) won't this be considering roaming and quite expensive?

if she wants to use it just for internet and not phone calls, can she set the phone to only access free wifi spots and not use the network?

Any input appreciated

It will work, but you may want to contact AT&T to put some kind of international rate plan in effect before she leaves. Just having your iPhone on can rack up data charges (if you have it set to push email etc.).

The best thing to do, if you know how to do it, is Jailbreak and Unlock, so she can buy a cheap pre-paid sim card in the Philippines. There are also people there who can do it for her, probably for a small fee. I did this for my sister who just got back from the Philippines, she told me it worked fine.

 

[skubish]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A400 Safari/528.16)

If you have data roaming off then it will only use wifi for data. And yes roaming data charges are very expensive.

 

[wr1020]

Data roaming is very expensive, my parents went on a cruise to Alaska and were gone for a week, and they were charged about $80 worth of roaming and they barely used there phones. This was on verizon but i'm sure AT&T will be the same or similar.

 

[Rayfire]

Hello

My wife is traveling to the Philippines. She is wondering:

a) will her iphone 3G from the U.S. work there for phone calls and internet?
It will work but like what other people said, the roaming charges will get you. I suggest if you know how to do it, jailbreak it and use a Globe or Smart sim on your iPhone then use it all the way you want at Philippines

b) won't this be considering roaming and quite expensive?
Roaming is expensive.

if she wants to use it just for internet and not phone calls, can she set the phone to only access free wifi spots and not use the network?
Yes you could always do that. If you don't want your iPhone jailbroken, you can just put it in Airplane mode the whole time to avoid roaming charges, then turn ON Wifi. You should be able to pick other networks using that.

Any input appreciated

Responses stated above, have a happy mabuhay trip!