Having eMail, Google Maps, wikipedia and even the weather report is a game changer for getting value for money whenever traveling to places strange to you.
Here is an outline:
The day before you leave, subscribe to
- subscribe to the "AT&T World Traveler", for a small, 30% discount for voice calls ( prorated $0.20/day)
- the 200MB/month "Data Global Add-on" ( pro-rated at $7/day for 6 MB/day )
- in "Settings", "Mail,...", turn off "Fetch New Data" and "Load Remote Images"
- in "Settings", "General", "Usage", push upon "Reset Statistics". This will total your billable amount. If you log in to a hotspot ( such as Hotel Ibis), that WiFi traffic is NOT accumulated to the "Sent/Received" total, which is what we need.
Return to "Settings", "General", "Usage" to watch your data usage! This 6MB/day is 95% smaller than typical usage.
- 0.1 Meg for a simple text eMail
- 1 Meg every time you update Google Maps
- 2 Meg to browse a monetized web-page with advertising, such as restaurants
- 3 Meg for actually downloading or uploading a cell-phone photo attached to an eMail.
- 3 Meg to catch-up with facebook ( and all those little pictures )
The problem is that, at the end of the journey, the sur-charge is US$5 for every megabyte over the budget. An iPhone can use 10 megabytes every five minutes. Sending an eMail with five pictures might be one megabyte, but sending it from an area with poor cell-phone coverage can might require several retries to transmit, but each attempt still accumulates to the usage and usage-charges, perhaps 25 additional dollars.
I had a problem that one of the apps used up my daily budget every five minutes, transmitting 1 Meg per minute of unknown data to an unknown destination. This happened while I was NOT using the iPhone! The Apple consultant pointed out that every APP I've ever stated continues to run in the background, and that one of the previously executed APPs was running up my bill. It is possible to terminate these bacground jobs and this can save hundreds and thousands of dollars.
I had a problem that my online iPhone was adding 3 "sent" megabytes every five minutes while idle, no email, no activity from me. This was a disaster. After the trip, an Apple Shop consultant in a blue t-shirt suggested that it was an "app" executing in the background. The old iPhone software ran apps one at a time. With todays version 4, the apps never stop! The Apple system is not careful enough with control to sub-total the data usage app by app, so the suggested remedy is to kill them all, by double clicking the "home button" to reveal the dozens of out-of-control apps, and then holding one them down for two seconds to make them all wiggle with red "x"s, then clicking each app to kill it. ( By the way, this suggested remedy has NOT been confirmed )
When returning, check your usage for each phone against the 6 Meg/day budget. If under budget, unsubscribe immediately. If over budget, keep the subscription one extra day for every 6 meg over budget.
UPDATE: careful study of the actual 20pp AT&T iPhone bill shows:
- voice calls from inside Germany cost $1.20 per minute, equal for both calls from Germany to Germany and calls from Germany to America.
- even after keeping calls short, one needs about 10 voice minutes for every person contacted ( such as each person visited).
- data, (eMail, Google maps and the weather report), costs $1.50 per Megabyte (when purchased at the maximum rate, "200MB/month"), but this price quadruples if the final average (within a billing period) exceeds 6 Megabytes per day.
- it appears that text messages, and even texted photos, have no surcharges for overseas traffic!
UPDATE #2: a CNET columnist mentions that the average iPhone subscriber uses 400MB/month, and names some data-tracking apps which give reports every 10 minutes:
- DataManPro
- Onavo
- WiFiMan tracks hot-spot, non-cell data usage
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