10-04-2011, 09:43 AM
Chakravartin wrote: If you do go with an local indie cellular provider, you lose the benefits of 3G service. (And if the iPhone 5 does 4G you'll lose both 3G and 4G.)
Why? Do you mean T-Mobile or a T-Mobile MVNO? Otherwise, the 3G should work. Yes, the GSM market in the USA is a joke, it may as well not exist. The two biggest GSM providers don't share 3G frequencies. The concept of unlocked phones doesn't really work here anymore. The pentaband phones are nice, but besides Nokia Symbian models, what phones ship with pentaband support? When Cingular, AT&T, T-Mobile, and a bunch of other GSM locals existed, the marketplace was much more GSM friendly. Oh well.
Not sure what you mean by 4G. Wouldn't Apple have to sell two different LTE models? I thought Verizon and AT&T had different frequencies for LTE? I wouldn't think Apple could have a single phone for the USA market if it required CDMA, GSM, and different LTE frequencies. Did you mean WiMAX (I think Sprint is the only WiMAX provider that sells phones)? Did you mean the faster HSPA+ that T-Mobile and AT&T call 4G?
The T-Mobile/Walmart announcement for $30 "unlimited" data (5GB of "4G"/3G and then EDGE speeds thereafter), unlimited messaging, and 100 talk minutes is interesting. Assuming the new iPhone isn't a pentaband model, unlimited 2G data and messaging with 100 minutes calling for $30 seems reasonable. If the cheapest iPhone plan is $55, that makes for a nice savings in the first year alone. EDGE is fast enough for AGPS, MMS, email, and light web browsing. Even downloading content isn't bad (movies generally take too long to download over EDGE and forget about streaming video, but audio download/streams should work).