Hijinks Inc.

Category: iPad

  • AT&T’s New Data Plans

    Death StarThis is more of a rant than an informative post…

    By now, I’m sure all of you have read about AT&T’s “fantastic” new data plans, offering such wonderful options as a DataPro plan with 2 friggin’ GBs of data a month! Holy crap!!

    Did anyone see my data usage for last month? I’d be screwed if they weren’t letting existing customers keep their unlimited plans, but now I can never cancel and re-up with the same plan at a later date, basically locking me into the very contract I was promised I’d avoid.

    The iPad is a fantastic platform to consume media with, I do so quite a bit while traveling and often in places that don’t have WiFi access or worse, charge for it. During the original announcement of the iPad 3G one of the primary selling points for me was the unlimited data plan, and before AT&T’s announcement of the their awesome new plans I was going to purchase a second iPad 3G for my wife to use, but frankly, 2GBs a month is in no way a ‘Pro’ data plan. I burn through that on my iPhone in a week, on my iPad in a few days. Really AT&T? You couldn’t at least top Verizon’s MiFi cap of 5GB? Now even though I admit I’m not a typical user, nor do I represent a typical users bandwidth consumption, I think we all can agree that these new plans are terrible. How can this be considered a competitive move in todays market, especially for drawing in new customers?

    I love how MacRumors pointed out that it was previously thought that Apple launched the iPad on AT&T based primarily on the $29.99 unlimited data plan.

    Apple had been expected by many observers to launch the iPad in a partnership with Verizon, but the Apple CEO Steve Jobs surprised many at the device’s January introduction by announcing that it would appear as an AT&T exclusive for 3G service in the U.S. Speculation centers around AT&T having outbid its competitors with its data plans for the iPad, offering unlimited data for $29.99 per month.

    There goes that theory…

    All in all, I’m concerned both as a shareholder and a consumer. This seems to be a major tactical misstep for both Apple and AT&T, am I just missing some massive piece of the puzzle?

  • Use Air Display Over a USB Cable

    From the department of the less than useful, i.e. my mind, comes a hack of debatable usefulness.

    Stepping back for a second, one might argue that this could come in handy for those who have crappy wireless networks or are working from a coffeeshop which has a completely rubbish network, as many do… But then you’d probably just switch to an ad-hoc network, nonetheless, I present for your general amusement, a way to run Avatron’s Air Display app [$9.99] over USB.

    Things you’ll need:

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  • iPad 3G Data Usage for May

    My first 30 days with my iPad 3G have come to a close and AT&T has sent me a confirmation email letting me know I’ve been charged for the next 30 days, not a nasty letter saying I use too much data. Even if that may be true.

    I’ll let this little screenshot tell the story:

    Yes, that’s 16.2GBs of sweet bandwidth usage, not bad, right? Guess this means AT&T wasn’t lying about unlimited data… At least for now. Though I should note that I did cheat a bit and enabled the downloading of apps over 20MB from the App Store, which likely accounts for a few gigs of usage.

    Fellow iPad 3G owners (or iPhone owners) what’s your bandwidth usage look like for the month of May?

  • Video: Using an iPad 3G’s Micro SIM in an iPhone

    For those of you who don’t believe that this works or don’t care to try it for yourself, here’s a video of an iPad 3G Micro SIM card being used in my stock iPhone 3G running iPhone OS 3.1.3.

    You can of course try this yourself by following the instructions outlined in my previous post.

  • Using a Micro SIM in an iPhone 3G

    There are countless videos and blog posts telling you how you can take your full size SIM card and cut it down to fit in your iPad, but frankly, that’s idiotic. I mean really, who’s going to cut up the SIM card they’re using in their $85+ a month iPhone to put in their iPad when they could just pay $30 a month for unlimited date on the iPad. Yes, you might be cutting up a T-Mobile SIM, but let’s face it… Do you really want to be using EDGE on an iPad?

    Anyhow, that’s not what this post is about. I’m going to show you how to do the exact opposite of that, how to take your Micro SIM and use it in your iPhone for cheap data only service. It’s easier than you might think.

    Update: Some sites are incorrectly reporting that you need a jailbroken iPhone for this to work, you do not.

    Update 2: You also watch this quick video walkthrough.

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