Help Buying a normal voice+data plan vs android plan

alok said:

With all this talk about people buying the i7500 from Germany; I was wondering if T-mobile has any rules/detection against us using an android phone bought from outside, on the network using a normal voice+data plan like the $30+$10 plan. Because given the price difference of a 2 yr contract ($360) a new phone would in theory need to be over $560 before it is no longer worth buying outside.

So what is the incentive of getting a simlocked phone, that costs more, and be locked into a 2 yr contract?

I guess this applies to some of the other smartphones as well.

TL;DR
Can I buy a phone on ebay and use the $10 data plan? Can they stop me?

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Russ Dill said:

The issue alok is describing is actually an IMEI filter, so yes, there is a technical reason. If your phone matches their IMEI filter and you do not have their smartphone data plan, then you do not pass go, nor collect $200. I don't know how long it will be (or if ever) until T-mobile adds the Galaxy to their IMEI filter, but when that happens, you'll need a smartphone data plan.

With that said, I currently have a grandfathered t-zones ($5.99-15% discount=$5.09) data plan that gives me full 3G without proxies as the t-zones used to.

I screwed up my SIM card recently and needed my PUK. When one calls T-mobile to request it, they give instructions along with it. They select the instructions based on your phone model. When I called, they knew that I had a Samsung GT-I7500 and gave me the generic Samsung instructions.

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zukbang said:

hey,

do you mind sharing your APN setting? I have the web2go unlimited and seems very slow...i only get 0.5 MB...
but my TM506 gets 1.5MB...something's not right..

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Russ Dill said:

I copied it from a friend's G1. I haven't tried a data test at full signal strength yet, so I couldn't give you a number. Also, do you mean Mb(bits) or MB(bytes)? Maximum theoretical under T-mobile HSDPA is 7.2Mb/s (iirc), which would equate to somewhere around 0.9MB/s.

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zukbang said:

I just got 0.42 mbps 424 kbps my edge speed was somewhere around 0.23 mbps
I was expecting more than 0.42 mb
something's not right...

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Russ Dill said:

I'll find somewhere with good signal strength and give speedtest.net a go.

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