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For me, that's not the painful part. The painful part is the six week limit. When I was in Taiwan, I was handed a prepaid dumbphone and a 4G wireless hotspot w
by nknighthb 13y ago
For me, that's not the painful part. The painful part is the six week limit.
When I was in Taiwan, I was handed a prepaid dumbphone and a 4G wireless hotspot with iffy battery life and some indoor coverage issues.
Being able to send/receive SMSs and brief phone calls with my smartphone's home number, and keep up on email and light browsing on my own phone without being at the mercy of the hotspot, would have been very nice, but I was there for ~9 months split into two trips during the course of a year.
I would gladly pay an extra $10-20/month (with $0.20/minute voice) for such capability over an extended period, but that wasn't, and apparently still is not, an option.
- car 13y agoIf you get one of the Blackberry UMA models or a T-Mobile branded phone with 'Wifi calling', those phones will work over Wifi anywhere in the world, at no extra cost. In other words, you can make and receive voice calls on your regular number, and the same for SMS via WLAN.
- HaloZero 13y agoI think that the case T-Mobile is going for is not the person who lives in another country for long periods of time for work but the traveller who has to constantly go back and forth between areas, or just a frequent vacationer. I imagine it's just better for you to get your own plan if you're spending 3/4 of the year there.
- nknighthb 13y agoGetting my own plan was a legal impossibility, and would have done little to help anyone in the US get hold of me. car's suggestion is at least an interesting half-solution. I didn't even consider a T-Mobile "wi-fi calling" phone at the time, as I'd been under the impression, right up until today, that T-Mobile had only had that feature for a couple years before abandoning it.