My $23/month iPhone (updated)

Acquir­ing the iPhone

So a while back I was lucky enough to acquire an unlocked iPhone 2g for a killer deal from a good friend who upgraded to the 3g. I decided there was no way I was going to pay the $65/month voice & data + 2yr con­tract ser­vice plan just to have and use the world’s best phone. So nat­u­rally, I started search­ing for alter­na­tive ways around this awful money-pit.

Jail­break + Unlock­ing the iPhone

I first jail­broke my iPhone using Quick­pwn, the pop­u­lar DIY easy jail­break­ing appli­ca­tion. But I soon found the mac ver­sion of Quick­pwn doesn’t incor­po­rate the steps to unlock the phone. I instead needed to use iPhonePWN (for mac) to unlock the base­band on my iPhone. Unlock­ing the base­band enables me to use vir­tu­ally any GSM enabled SIM card in my iPhone to send & receive calls.

The GoPhone®

Once my base­band was unlocked, I promptly drove down to the local AT&T store, and bought a $25 Pay-as-you-go  GoPhone card (which comes with a new SIM card) and had them port my pre­vi­ous Ver­i­zon phone num­ber to the newly acquired GoPhone account.

To be safe, before acti­vat­ing my GoPhone account, I down­loaded the iPhone app Boss Prefs in order to dis­able the Edge capa­bil­i­ties of my phone. We don’t want it pulling data down for 1¢/kb and suck­ing up my $25 card. I popped in the new SIM card, then acti­vated my account and VOILA! Send­ing & receiv­ing calls on my iPhone with a pay-as-you go card! The one catch – no visual voice­mail. That is acti­vated through AT&T’s iPhone only ser­vice plans.

The Skype Plan

In order to take this one step fur­ther, I decided to see if my GoPhone — iPhone GoPwn could use the Medi­anet® ser­vice offered to reg­u­lar GoPhone cus­tomers. Hoo boy! Full inter­net access for $20 per 100mb — not bad. Now I can use my edge again… This would never be suf­fi­cient for teth­er­ing to my lap­top, but just enough to browse the web and reap the many ben­e­fits of an edge/3g enabled iPhone.

SKYPE!! So next I down­loaded the newly released Skype app. It works bril­liantly! Skype to Skype calls with the iPhone are no prob­lem! There was one catch… Skype app is lim­ited to WIFI net­works only. So I down­loaded the jail­break app VOIPover3G and this tricks Skype into think­ing the phone is always on WIFI.  I bought a Skype num­ber for 9 bucks and an unlim­ited Skype callilng plan to get inbound and out­bound calls to any phone for $3/month.

Skype calls on the Edge data net­work are just fine and use hardly any band­width. I also down­loaded the jail­break app Back­grounder so I can keep my Skype app run­ning while the phone is locked & in my pocket.

Con­clu­sion

That’s my story! I will keep some credit on my GoPhone account for emer­gen­cies, or occa­sional lazy moments, but besides that just a $20 refill for the data plan, with a lit­tle extra work using the Skype app, and I save myself a bun­dle using mobile VOIP!

++Extra Bonus — No con­tract, I can just stop pay­ing if I need to!

My next goal is to some­how tie this in with my Google.com/voice account!

Update… April 23rd 2009

After about a month of using this setup and the enor­mous pop­u­lar­ity of this post, I decided to follow-up and address some of the ques­tions that have been asked.

Does this really work?

Yes, this works. That’s why I wrote about my experience.

Is this for me? Can I do this to my iphone?

No. This is not for every­one. It is cer­tainly not a fully func­tional, flaw­less method of using an iphone for $23/mo. If you are how­ever some­what tech savvy and will­ing to take some extra steps to save some money and you hap­pened to get a contract-free iphone like I did for $80, then go for it.

What about Skype how well does that work?

Skype works as it should (over WIFI).  I have heard sto­ries of it crash­ing fre­quently on jail­bro­ken iphones. This has not been the case for me. I am on iPhone soft­ware 2.2 (5G77) and it has worked fine. How­ever, Skype over Edge has been a dif­fer­ent story. While it does work, it has it’s issues. For instance: Con­nect­ing a call can take any­where from 10 to 20 sec­onds. 1 out of 5 or 6 times the call is dis­con­nected. There is a lit­tle lag between calls from VOIP to Voice and some­times appli­ca­tion lag. Also, Skype will not con­tinue work­ing when chang­ing net­works. For exam­ple, when leav­ing a WIFI and switch­ing to Edge the Skype appli­ca­tion must be relaunched in order to send or receive calls.

What about bat­tery life with Skype run­ning 24/7?

The bat­tery life has been fine for me so-far. This is likely due to the fact that I’m a graphic designer and I have the lux­ury of leav­ing my phone plugged in for at least 4–6 hrs a day.

Is the 100mb/mo sufficient?

The 100mb Medi­aNet is a ser­vice from goPhone for the price of $20. This data expires after 30 days. I am around a WIFI prob­a­bly 80% of my day. So the other 20% of my life I’m not on WIFI, I reg­u­larly checked my email, looked up maps, made calls and watched the occa­sional video. I used about 65mb in 30 days of usage. This 100mb would never be suf­fi­cient for teth­er­ing, but it works just fine for all the iphone apps which call for inter­net usage.

What about SMS?

If your feel­ing ambi­tious, there are sev­eral iPhone apps that let you send free text mes­sages VIA data. They have their draw­backs (unable to reply some­times, and hav­ing to check a web­page for incom­ing mes­sages… The other solu­tion is to use Skype’s SMS ser­vice, but they have their own fees which aren’t much bet­ter than AT&T’s SMS plans. I am not a huge tex­ter so I have just been buy­ing blocks of SMS mes­sages on my GoPhone account — $4.99 for 200 messages.