What service plan do I NEED for an iPhone?

[pixelbaker]

I'll be switching to AT&T/Cingular pretty soon and I had never seen any threads on what service plan you would actually have to sign up for to use the iPhone. I'll be adding whatever phone I get to my brother's existing plan and sharing his minutes/SMS.

I was wondering if I could just buy an iPhone (ebay, online store, wherever...) and use it with his service if all that I wanted to do is use SMS, regular minutes, ONLY wifi for net connectivity, no visual voicemail. Is that an option? Will they let you do that?

 

[FSUSem1noles]

I'll be switching to AT&T/Cingular pretty soon and I had never seen any threads on what service plan you would actually have to sign up for to use the iPhone. I'll be adding whatever phone I get to my brother's existing plan and sharing his minutes/SMS.

I was wondering if I could just buy an iPhone (ebay, online store, wherever...) and use it with his service if all that I wanted to do is use SMS, regular minutes, ONLY wifi for net connectivity, no visual voicemail. Is that an option? Will they let you do that?

all plans include visual voicemail...

If you have an account with AT&T already, you can just add the data plan for $20, they also have two other data plans, but the $20 is the cheapest.. the other 2 just include more text messages..

http://www.apple.com/iphone/easysetup/rateplans.html

 

[r6girl]

unless you use independence to activate it (and i'm not sure this works anymore with the 1.1.1 firmware, but i think not), itunes will force you to activate the phone and choose a plan (new or an existing phone number). if you activate it using your brother's cell number/account, it will assume that the iphone is your the new phone for your brother's account, and the sim in his current phone will be de-activated, and the one in the iphone will be activated. you can't just pop in an already-active sim into the iphone - it must be activated using the one that it comes with out of the box.

assuming your brother is going to keep his current phone and number, you'll need to add the iphone under another number and look at the family plan options. i'm not familiar with these, though - the at&t site will give you more information on these...