My wife and I are loyal iPhone users, really heavily bought into that entire ecosystem. But I recently wanted an Android phone -- and the HTC One looked really good to me.
I knew that this Summer we had planned a trip to Iceland, and I can't live without Internet everywhere. I usually use an older older Nokia N900 phone for roaming, using a local SIM in whatever country we end up. But it never did better than EDGE so it had to be replaced.
So I got a developer edition of the HTC One.
Unlike many other countries, Iceland makes this easy. They sell local SIM cards on the inbound flight to the island. Before I got on the plane, I turned off data on my HTC One. I also had configured our iPhones with AT&T's cheapest 120 meg international plan for $30 -- just in case something went wrong.
On the plane I popped in the SIM and when we landed, I fired it up. The shuttle bus to Reykjavik had free wifi, so I used that to go to the siminn.is website and bought their 5 gig data addon for -- get this -- about $18. Popped it in, worked right away when I turned data back on. Even the APN settings were automatically set.
I used the tethering app and kept a hotspot on the entire journey. Both our iPhones, and iPad, and a Surface Pro were configured to use it. And so it stayed in my pocket all the time, providing cheap mobile Internet during the trip. (I didn't use the HTC for much more than hotspot since I needed all its battery life just for that)
At the end of the week, we had consumed 4.7 gigs of the 5 gig allowance. A few things consumed a lot of the bandwidth. 1) My wife decided to upload videos to Facebook one evening. 2) When my Surface Pro connected, it downloaded almost a gig of updates since it hadn't been on for a while.
Now here's where the savings came in. If I had went for the largest international data package on AT&T it would have been $120 for 800 megs. Anything over 800 megs is charged at $30 for each 120 megs over. So $120 for 800 plus 33 buckets of 120 megs for $990. It would have cost me $1110 for data.
Now here's the scary part. If you don't buy an International package and still data roam, on AT&T it costs $19.868/MB. That means, my data usage would have cost me almost $94,000 if I hadn't done any planning (I would hope they'd cut me off after a few thousand bucks, but still....). This insanity rate is why I added the (relatively) cheap $30/120 MB package to each iPhone. That way if my HTC One was off-line, or out of range, and one of us still used data -- we'd be covered against a crippling bill. (I didn't want to turn off data roaming on the iPhones in case we were separated. We use imessage a lot and that helped save a small fortune on international text messages too.)
So now I'm back, I still have this cherry HTC One which I do use stateside. I either carry them both or bring one of the other with me for the day depending on my mood!
TL;DR - Went to Iceland, local SIM in One, used 4.7 gigs, saved $1,110
I knew that this Summer we had planned a trip to Iceland, and I can't live without Internet everywhere. I usually use an older older Nokia N900 phone for roaming, using a local SIM in whatever country we end up. But it never did better than EDGE so it had to be replaced.
So I got a developer edition of the HTC One.
Unlike many other countries, Iceland makes this easy. They sell local SIM cards on the inbound flight to the island. Before I got on the plane, I turned off data on my HTC One. I also had configured our iPhones with AT&T's cheapest 120 meg international plan for $30 -- just in case something went wrong.
On the plane I popped in the SIM and when we landed, I fired it up. The shuttle bus to Reykjavik had free wifi, so I used that to go to the siminn.is website and bought their 5 gig data addon for -- get this -- about $18. Popped it in, worked right away when I turned data back on. Even the APN settings were automatically set.
I used the tethering app and kept a hotspot on the entire journey. Both our iPhones, and iPad, and a Surface Pro were configured to use it. And so it stayed in my pocket all the time, providing cheap mobile Internet during the trip. (I didn't use the HTC for much more than hotspot since I needed all its battery life just for that)
At the end of the week, we had consumed 4.7 gigs of the 5 gig allowance. A few things consumed a lot of the bandwidth. 1) My wife decided to upload videos to Facebook one evening. 2) When my Surface Pro connected, it downloaded almost a gig of updates since it hadn't been on for a while.
Now here's where the savings came in. If I had went for the largest international data package on AT&T it would have been $120 for 800 megs. Anything over 800 megs is charged at $30 for each 120 megs over. So $120 for 800 plus 33 buckets of 120 megs for $990. It would have cost me $1110 for data.
Now here's the scary part. If you don't buy an International package and still data roam, on AT&T it costs $19.868/MB. That means, my data usage would have cost me almost $94,000 if I hadn't done any planning (I would hope they'd cut me off after a few thousand bucks, but still....). This insanity rate is why I added the (relatively) cheap $30/120 MB package to each iPhone. That way if my HTC One was off-line, or out of range, and one of us still used data -- we'd be covered against a crippling bill. (I didn't want to turn off data roaming on the iPhones in case we were separated. We use imessage a lot and that helped save a small fortune on international text messages too.)
So now I'm back, I still have this cherry HTC One which I do use stateside. I either carry them both or bring one of the other with me for the day depending on my mood!
TL;DR - Went to Iceland, local SIM in One, used 4.7 gigs, saved $1,110
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram