A G1 Problem
Tomorrow morning, if all goes well, I will become the owner of a G1, a high end cell phone built by HTC, sold by T-mobile, using software from Google. In an earlier post I described some of the things I liked about it.
There is, however, one problem. Immediately after getting the phone, I am flying to London. When I asked T-Mobile support about the use of the phone for data abroad, I was told that the charge is $15/megabyte. That for a phone with a claimed download rate of almost a megabyte a second.
It wouldn't be so bad if the issue were only web browsing. I expect to be staying mostly in hotels with WiFi, so can connect over that, from the phone or, more likely, my netbook. But I was very much looking forward to using the GPS feature of the phone, wandering around London with a magic map of the city in my pocket showing where I was.
I don't think that is going to be a practical option. The G1, unlike a dedicated GPS device, doesn't have its maps in memory, it downloads them as needed. Wandering around London at $15/megabyte could get expensive pretty fast.
The obvious solution is to get a temporary SIM card from a british carrier, such as T-Mobile's own British operations. As best I can tell, that would give me unlimited internet usage for a pound a day, which I would be more than happy to pay. But the G1 comes locked, which apparently means that not only can I not use it with a SIM card from another network, I can't even use it with a SIM card from T-Mobile's British operations. So it looks as though I am going to have to wait until I get back to the U.S. to get much use out of my new toy.