GSM? Yeah, I will wait to see what Tmobile will do. I hate At&T. I have my iphone on Tmobile. I will never dd AT&T though. Never, again. Not even for free.

I especially like the tiered pricing; I just eBayed my (original) iPhone and replaced it with a (new) iPod Touch and simple pay-as-you-go phone because I don’t move much data over the cell-phone network, and I didn’t like having to cough up the same amount each month as somebody who’s streaming YouTube videos or something.

I might wish for true pay-as-you-go pricing like my current phone’s talk time, except that it would probably be priced so you need a really low usage to realize savings.  For example, I had the choice between 20 cents per text message or $5 per month for 200 messages on my current phone; paying per message makes sense only up to 25 messages per month, so for intermediate use from 26 to 200, the $5 per month is cheaper.  If this kind of ratio applied to data plans, one might expect $15 to buy about 30MB of data transfer a la carte (i.e., 1/8 as much as paying that $15 for a month’s worth, up to 250MB), or about 50 cents per MB.  Of course, my current phone charges 1 cent per kB, i.e., $10 per MB, so that would still be a screamin’ deal in comparison!  All in all, I hope that this flexibility eventually trickles down to the iPhone data plans so low-(3G-)bandwidth folks like my wife (who just got an iPhone 3G) can save some money.

The iPad won’t work on t-mobile.  “hmmm” needs to do more homework on his own carrier.

The iPhone 3G, if jailbroken, will function as a phone on the t-mobile network, but I’m sure hmmm knows that 3G does not, since t-mobile is retarded and decided they would use a different standard for 3G from the rest of the world.  Apple wisely chose to support the GSM-based 3G standard that AT&T and the rest of the world use.  T-mobile, in it’s own little walled garden, uses frequencies that would require every phone maker to add extra chipsets to every phone just to support t-mobile’s network (here in the US).

The iPad clearly uses the same radio tech as the iPhone, so it speaks AT&T’s flavor of 3G. (And the same flavor Europe uses, eventually)  On the iPhone, you have more than just a 3G connection: You have 2G connections and plain cellular (non-data) connections available, so it works… somewhat… on t-mobile’s network, if you jailbrake the iPhone so it’s unlocked.  The iPad comes to us unlocked… no jailbrake necessary!  But since it’s unable to communicate on t-mobile’s frequency, and it’s not a cellphone so the other frequencies aren’t a fallback option, it simply won’t work.

Unlocked is no advantage just now since it needs a micro-sim