Traveling to another country? With an eSIM, you can rest assured your iPhone can get online. Photo: Jeshoots.com/Unsplash License
You may already know about SIM cards for cellular data, those little microchips that slide on trays in or out of smartphones. But the future of connectivity is eSIM cards, and that future is now.
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iPhones and other smart gadgets already come with eSIM built in. And one of the best ways to use this convenient new technology is to enjoy international travel with unlimited eSIM data from Holafly.
Holafly’s eSIM unlimited data plans cover you when you travel. They’re tailored to your destinations. And they keep your iPhone connected in many countries, hassle-free, while also keeping costs down.
We’ve known that T-Mobile was doing away with two-year phone contracts for quite some time, but exact details haven’t been revealed until today. Unlike the other big U.S. carriers (AT&T, Verizon and Sprint), T-Mobile isn’t doing subsidized, two-year contracts for smartphones anymore. Instead, you pay as you go—and the monthly rates look very good.
We're probably going to charge for everything we can get away with. Until we can't.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson responded today to the recent rumor that the telecommunications company is planning to charge customers for data used in FaceTime calls over 3G. The feature was announced for iOS 6 in June at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco.
Asked about the rumor at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Stephenson acknowledged the rumor, but then also said it’s “too early to talk about pricing,” which may in fact be executive-speak for, “we won’t tell you how much we’re gonna charge.”
iPhone users consumer more 3G data on average than any other platform
It’s a pretty good bet that iPhones and iPads will be responsible for 3G/4G traffic spikes around the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week as Apple developers lucky enough to score a ticket attend WWDC. Beyond this week, however, it seems that iPhone users have a tendency to gobble up a large amount of data – more so than other platforms including Android.
On average, iPhone owners represent about 20% of smartphone customers for mobile carriers worldwide. You might expect that those customers would amount to around 20% of data usage. That isn’t the case as iPhone users account for an average 45% of carrier data traffic and data use by iPhone users is more consistent than data consumed by Android customers.
One of the challenges when traveling internationally with iPhone or iPad is handling data roaming. There are two reasons that it’s incredibly easy to end up with a large bill when traveling for work or vacation.
One reason is that iOS features and apps can use data without you realizing it (iCloud’s Photostream feature being a great example) – to avoid such issues, you can disable data roaming in the iOS Settings app. The second reason is that the costs associated with international data roaming are rarely spelled out well by carriers.
At least one carrier is hoping to change that. This week Verizon announced that it will be offering customers a new set of international data plans intended to make managing data roaming easier to understand and track.
Have you ever wished that there was an easier way to check your data usage on the iPhone? For those of us that aren’t lucky enough to have a grandfathered unlimited plan, bits are precious. It can be too easy to blow through a 1GB data plan in a month’s time.
If your iPhone is jailbroken, you have access to a great tweak called Data Usage Monitor. Once installed, your usage will be shown unobtrusively in your iPhone’s status bar. The beauty is that it will only appear whenever you are using data.
We’ve known about Verizon’s plan to introduce family shared data plans for quite some time now and have been patiently awaiting their release. It now appears we may see them soon as new images have popped up suggesting Verizon is in the end stages of development. PhoneArena managed to get their hands on a screenshot showing what appears to be Verizon’s future Family Data Usage Calculator. If it looks familiar to you it’s because it follows closely with Verizon’s current Data Usage Calculator which helps customers figure out which plan would best fit their data usage needs.
You could buy a new iPad from AT&T's stores starting on Friday morning, but why would you?
This shouldn’t take anyone by surprise, but with the new iPad going on sale on Friday at 8 a.m. at Apple Stores around the country, AT&T will also have units that they’ll be selling at their retail outlets on the same day. Don’t count on being able to easily get one, though.