60 Days Without Voice Service

AT&T

Its officially been sixty days since I last made a phone call on my iPhone that wasn’t over VoIP and life is good. Not only do I have $200+ extra dollars in my bank account but I haven’t had a dropped call either. I’d say all things considered, my iPhone 3G is aging rather well.

Since my last update, I’ve used 803 minutes of talk time and 649 text messages. 90% of my calls were incoming, so I wasn’t really bothered by the indirect method required for placing a call. The only real change I’ve made to my setup is I’ve switched over the to G.729 codec for calls (both over WiFi and 3G) with good results, though it does require an in-app purchase from Acrobits Softphone but it seems to be worth it so far.

One drawback I’ve run into is the fact that I can’t send or receive picture messages with my Google Voice number, I can of course just attach the photo to an email and most cell phones will accept it as a picture message (assuming you send them to the appropriately formatted mobile email address), but trying to explain to all my friends that they need to send their photos to my email has proved to be a bit more of a problem. It’s not the end of the world, especially since a good portion of photos both my friends and myself want to share end up uploaded to TwitPic or another similar service, but it might be an issue for some.

I would like to take this oppurtunity to point out this blurb I ran across in an article on TUAW (which doesn’t merit its own article):

Guerra made me promise to mention that MicroSIM adapters were pioneered by Aaron at hijinksinc.

That’s right folks, I apparently am a pioneer. Certainly news to me.

Comments

3 responses to “60 Days Without Voice Service”

  1. Dave Sack Avatar
    Dave Sack

    Congrats on the whole pioneer thing! 🙂

  2. luckyjason Avatar
    luckyjason

    I just got my 2nd 30 day renewal today! This has been awesome. My minute usage is avg 2000 mins and around 1500 texts per month. I started using “textnow” at the beginning of july, forwarding my texts to the email address provided for a real texting experience. Works well to reply, and resuming messages within a week.

    I also bought Bria softphone by Counterpath, its a good app on the iphone, missing the push features of Acrobits, but has the benefits of the Acrobits business phone due to be released. Whichever supports the background VOIP first is when I’ll take the plunge on G.729.

    1. gammal Avatar
      gammal

      Anyone know how to cancel the data plan without an iPad?

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