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guillee:

actionaad:

Scenario: you (like me, a month ago) are going to the United States for a trip. You have an unlocked iPhone you can use with any carrier world-wide — but you are confused by the lack of a “sell me an iPhone SIM card” option on AT&T’s Byzantine website. You want to make your phone work with a minimum of hassle. You’ve looked at various sites and guides but you’re still confused. You want the ability to make a few short calls and have a decent amount of mobile data for Google Maps and TripAdvisor and Yelp and other touristy things. Here’s what you do.

This guide by Richard helped me out enormously in setting up a prepaid AT&T line in the iPhone 3GS Nicky just hooked me up with (thanks, Nicky!) However, I did run into a small gotcha not covered here, and it’s worth mentioning in case anyone wants to try this.

As Richard says, if you buy an AT&T GoPhone card by itself, you’ll need a non-iPhone IMEI number just to activate it, and it won’t lock the SIM card to that phone. However, if you instead buy an actual $15 GoPhone turdphone and try to use its SIM card in another phone, it won’t work, because in that case it is locked to the phone it came in. In that case, call AT&T’s GoPhone customer support at 1-800-901-9878, yell “OPERATOR” until you get through to a human, and ask them to unlock the SIM card because you want to use it in another phone. They’ll be happy to do it, and will guide you through a series of steps, one of which is to give them the new phone’s IMEI number. When you give it to them, they’ll ask if it’s an iPhone, and they’ll tell you that unfortunately GoPhone lines aren’t completely supported on the iPhone, so you won’t be able to use data on it, even if you buy a GoPhone data package. That part is unfortunately true, but easily fixed by getting a proper AT&T APN profile from unlockit.co.nz like Richard explains (although I’m not sure yet if that data I’m using is coming out of my GoPhone credit, or my 500MB data plan; I’ll update once I’m sure.)