Pay-as-you-go voice and SMS service for a contract-free AT&T iPhone with H2O Wireless

Four months ago AT&T declared war on us. Until then I'd had both children on our family plan, using old out-of-contract (but not unlocked!) iPhones with voice only service. On a day of infamy, AT&T hit us with mandatory $30/month data plans. Our too high monthly mobile bills went much higher.

That's when I fought back. Four weeks later, I declared victory. I'd slashed our monthly phone bills, not least by replacing SMS texting with iMessage (even to the SIM-less iPhone 4) and rare paid SMS. As a side-effect of operation vengeance I even picked up a new iPhone 4S - iMessage and a new subsidy made it cost-effective.

There was only one downside. Number 2 son loved using my iPhone 4 as an iPod Touch, but he no longer had voice service. He really didn't care about that, but we're heading to DC for a family trip. He has a knack for getting lost, so I wanted to be able to phone him.  I decided to follow up on an H2O wireless plan (AT&T reseller) I'd considered last November ...

Giving your old iPhone to your kid: working around AT&T's mandatory data plan

I'm planning to test a H2O Wireless SIM Card (no jailbreak or unlocking for AT&T phones) ... there's a MyH2O app on the App Store. However the H2O wireless cards expire after 30 days, so they're better suited to a heavy voice/data user than to our guys; there's really no saving over our family plan....

I dropped into Best Buy to check out the options. I found two quite different H2O plans:

• a voice and SMS only plan with an initial 90 day expiration. $10 price includes $7 of talk time and another 30 days to the expiration. Afterwords expiration time depends on how much you buy: $10 is 30 day, $20 is 60, $90 is 90 and $100 is 1 year. Whatever you pay talk is 0.05/min and SMS is 0.05/message.
• a voice/SMS/data plan with a 5-30 day expiration depending whether payment is per-minute or per-month [1]. Not clear if $10 package includes any services.

I had to make a quick call, and based on the premise that I should only buy what I need now, I went for the voice/SMS only. [2] For you, dear reader, I suggest carefully studying the cost of the new $100 1 year expiration option for the voice/data plan. It's not clear how one switches from voice/SMS to voice/data, I suspect it involves buying a new SIM card and switching the old number (see Help, My Account)

Briefly, it worked. Here's what I did after I bought the card (the procedures for data plan support are slightly more involved, but I'm only writing on what worked for me):

• Went to a local "World of Wireless" shop and paid them $5 to punch out a micro-SIM from the H2) standard SIM [3]
• Followed the directions and went to H2OWirelessNow.com/activate
  
  • Registered, providing my Yahoo.com (junk) email and my Google Voice number. Maybe overly protective, I noticed that the 'spam-me' checkbox was opt-in, which is commendable.
  • After I registered Chrome "sat there". I had to lick 'Activate" on the menu to get to the next step.
  • Choose MINUTE Plan
  • From Activate I entered the ActFast code, desired area code, and then city.
• I then picked up my confirmation mail from Yahoo.com account. It said the phone would be ready in 10 minutes and told me my new number.
• About 6 minutes later I put the micro-SIM in the iPhone and powered it up. On startup it said H2O in the connection bar.
• I tried phoning out, but nothing happened. So I called into the new phone -- that worked. After that I could call out too.
• iMessage still worked (yay).
• Dial *777# send to check account balance and expiration. It said my balance was $6.55 and it would expire on 5/5/12 (60 days, not 90!)
• Tested MyH2O.app - worked quite well to show balance. I found a very brief call cost about 5 cents or so.
• I connected to the recharge page and added $10. That brought my total to $16.96 and moved the expiration to 5/4/2012 (90 days)

I'm pleased. I may add $10 every few months, that will likely cover Number 2's use of the iPhone 4 -- at a wee fraction of what AT&T was charging us with a mandatory and unwanted data plan [4]. (MISTAKE 5/18/2012: I missed a very big gotcha! After the initial 90 days the expiration falls to 30 day for $10, so the actually minimal cost of the phone is around $100 a year. Significantly more than I'd imagined.)

If you purchase $10 renewals via credit card they may appear on your statement as "Shop Locus 800-6205809 Nj".

The plan includes voice mail [6], thought Apple's elegant voice mail won't work without a data plan and accessing voice mail uses up plan minutes. Instead I configured my son's Google Voice number to be the voice mail service [5]. If he misses a call he gets an SMS notification with a message transcription, and an email with a link to the voice file.

At this time, the experiment looks promising.

- fn -

[1] That's what it said on the package. Later, visiting the H2O site, it seemed there were more data plan options than the package suggested -- including a new $100 payment that takes a year to expire -- reminds me of the plan a friend used with his Android phone.

[2] One fringe benefit -- no data plan means less concern about Apple's fake parental controls.

[3] WOW is a different scene from AT&T stores. This is a cash-centric business. Maybe some other sites will cut the micro-SIM for free, or you could try cutting down the card with a razor blade, but Dawayne did it with flair and the card fit my son's iPhone 4 perfectly. Well worth the $5.

[4] It's even cheaper than the $10/month added line phone (plus $4 fees/taxes) we used to have -- and SMS is cheaper. Of course AT&T may terminate this loophole any day now, but they can't force a data rate on us. They can only close off a revenue source; that's hard to do when SMS is going away and desperation is setting in.

[5] Our family has worked from a free Google Apps and family domain for five years. It's trivial now to give each family member a Google Voice account. Within GV there's an option to 'add GV' to any verified phone, makes it the answering service.

[6] The setup directions are poorly written and, I suspect, might be partly in error. I didn't try though.

See also:

Mine

• AT&T and the mandatory iPhone tax - even out of contract phones must pay 11/2011
• Giving your old iPhone to your kid: working around AT&T's mandatory data plan 11/2011
• The Gordon vs. AT&T iPhone war - Conclusion 11/30/2011
• Turning an iPhone into an iPod touch - keep the original SIM! 11/28/2011
• Configuring Google Voice as mobile phone voice mail 9/2009
• The iPhone - Android cost difference is getting large 10/2011
• iMessage use on an AT&T iPhone without a SIM card (iPod Touch mode) 11/30/2011
• iPhone micro: How SMS pricing is accelerating the smartphone transition 11/24/2011
• The fear that's driving AT&T's smartphone data plan policies 11/2011

H2O site

• H2O Wireless general setup (https://www.h2owirelessnow.com)
• H2O-Config iPHone setup (data plan only)
• App Store - MyH2O - check balance, rechartge with PIN
• Confusing! Minute Plans at $10 for 30 days? With data? - interesting ...
• Help for talk, text

Other

• Iphone on h2o wireless - MacRumors Forums
• Best Buy - H2O Wireless Unlimited Prepaid Wireless SIM Card customer reviews - product reviews - read top consumer ratings

Update 5/19/2012

We've done well with H2O Wireless so far, but this feels very much like a business on the edge. For example, I wanted another voice/text (no data) SIM for another son, but I couldn't find it on their web site. The site only has voice, text and data SIMs. I did find a voice/text only SIM via Best Buy.

Recharging is an odd workflow. It's done only through their web site, not the MyH2O app. It's something like this:

1. Go the H2O web site and login
2. Click on Recharge H2O Wireless
3. Choose "Do You Need a PIN"? In fact this simply adds minutes, there's no 15 digit PIN installed.
4. Enter the number (again) and Click Search. (should be labeled Confirm Number) 
5. Now you can select an amount to enter (example: $10). A confirmation email is sent to you account.
6. They don't take AMEX. That's a bad sign; AMEX is quick to dump ill-behaved vendors.

This time activating a new SIM card didn't work quite as quickly. It took about 5-8 minutes for the activation email to show up in my Yahoo (junk email account -- I cleared out all the spam and junk so incoming email would not get lost).

Other than that however it worked well. I noticed this time that with each transaction there's a message summarizing cost and balance -- most helpful with kids. I also realized that the way expiration works if someone doesn't use the phone much they build up quite a large balance -- but if the expiration date is hit it all goes at once. So the phone costs about $100 a year, not $40 a year. Tricky, tricky.

Update 8/28/2013

Two odd things have happened:

• A $10 payment extends account lifespan by 90 days instead of 30 days. So for low cost use the phone can cost as $40 a year. I wonder if someone lost a lawsuit. 
• The kids phones are now showing 3G data available. It doesn't actually work, but it's shown as available. This can mess up the iPhone because it tries to send iMessage messages as data instead of as SMS. I had to go in Settings and turn off mobile data.

Fixing Siri - When Really Sorry isn't good enough

[Update: before you try resetting network settings, try simply turning Siri off then on again.]

All Siri says to me is "I'm really sorry about this, but I can't take any requests right now." At first I thought she was playing hard to get. Then I figured she'd found another 23 million people.

I'm not the only broken heart, there are 177,000 Google hits on Siri "I'm really sorry about this".

Not so great for Apple's flagship product, so I started in on a pretty good rant. That's how I came across this (marginally good) advice:

Siri says I'm really sorry about this...: Apple Support Communities
... Goto: SETTINGS>GENERAL>RESET>RESET ALL SETTINGS [Don't do this!] Then follow the commands and reset your phone. You'll have to re-enter some info like Wi-Fi settings/passwords.... and then turn Siri and Location services back on.... but thats it and Siri should start to work again...

I gave it a try -- and it worked! Unfortunately, I also lost my custom wallpaper, I had to reconfigure iMessage, I lost my dictionary, and my iPhone restarted as thought it were a new phone (scary!).

The trick is only reset NETWORK settings. You don't need to Reset All. You'll still need to reenable iMessage and you may get the 'new phone' restart. If you do, ignore the 'restore' options, just choose setup as new phone. Everything will be there except iMessage configuration; so review your existing Message setup before you reset.

So why did this bring Siri back to me?

A clue is what you find when you search on "I'm really sorry about this ...". It's what hackers get when they try to enable Siri on an iPhone 4 and they're going through a "bad" proxy server. I was a relatively early 4S user, and I'm guessing when I signed up I was assigned a proxy server that's now overloaded or broken. When I reset, I'm guessing I was assigned a new proxy server.

Presumably in the next iOS update Apple will have some fix for this problem.

Deleting Google: Is Latitude broken?

I'm late to the great Google divorce party -- tomorrow Google promises to exploit and sell everything that they've got on us. (Not sure if that includes Docs and Email -- soon if not now.)

It was easy to delete my extensive search history, but the Google Latitude management page is missing its delete history button. Looks like they forgot that one.

It's sad how fast and far Google's reputation has fallen. I'm at a Silicon Valley (think LA without the beaches or the glamour) tech conference today, and Google gets the disdain Microsoft once owned. I wonder if they've noticed, or if they've figured out that Larry Page is not Steve Jobs.

A fix for OS X lousy print sharing - the AirPort Express

I've been struggling with my OS X 10.6 shared Brother HL-2140 ever since I bought it. Whatever I tried, at least once a week I'd get an error message that was supposedly fixed with 10.5.5:

Mac OS X 10.5.5: USB connected printers do not print; printer queue displays "Printer is currently off-line" ... 

... After updating to Mac OS X 10.5.5, you may not be able to print to some USB-based printers. This message may appear in the printer queue: "Printer is currently off-line." 

... Open this link in a web browser:  (http://localhost:631/printers/) Click the "Modify Printer" button for your affected USB printer queue. Click Continue.  You may need to wait a few seconds. From the "Device:" pop-up menu, select "Unknown USB". Click Continue. The "Make:" list should highlight the manufacturer of your printer. Click Continue. Select the printer model that is attached. Click "Modify Printer". Enter an administrator account name and password....

Alas, that 10.5.5 measure didn't work, though it's nice to know that localhost:631 interface to the CUPS printing service. Maybe 10.7 is better, but I'm trying to avoid that mangy beast.

I had past success with the networked Brother MFC-7820N - I only gave up on it when the print mechanism started jamming (old). I figured when my next printer cartridge was due I'd look for something better. Alas, we're WLAN these days, and the reviews for Brother's wireless printers are not good. In fact, there don't seem to be any good reviews for anything. Printing is fading away.

So instead I disconnected the printer from our 10.6 iMac and connected it to an old and underused 802.11G Airport Express. That did the trick. It's been two weeks and the 2140 has been working for all of us. Cheaper (free in our case) and more reliable than a printer WiFi client.

iMovie '11: deleting rejected clips reduces video quality

The great thing about my home video archive project [1] is that there are always more pitfalls. I suppose it's a bit like golf that way.

In the last few days, for example, I discovered that the 10 or so hours of analog video I'd painfully captured had only one audio channel [2]. Prior to that I figured out that the existence of an Event repository on an external firewire drive was preventing thumbnail generation with new event capture.

Yes, it reminds me of the joys DesqView/QEMM DOS memory management. Be glad you don't know what I mean.

Even better, last night I discovered that iMovie '11s "Move Rejected Clips to Trash" feature destructively degrades archival video quality. Without, I might add, any warning.

Like all video pitfalls, this surprised me. I remember QuickTime Pro was very good at excising bits of DV files [3]; select the region, delete, quickly get a smaller file. Alas, iMovie doesn't work this way.

Instead iMovie decompresses (decodes to lossless) the clip, which in the case of my Analog to Digital capture is the entire file. [4] Then it excises the unwanted segments and it re-compresses to back to DV-25, changing the packaging as well (from .DV to .MOV). Since DV-25 is a lossy form of compression [5] there's a significant quality degradation from removing unwanted clips, such as the trailing frames iMovie creates after my camera's DV stream ends.

Oh joy. Now I get to redo that tape [6].

So why does Apple do this [7]? Probably because nobody seems to have noticed. Even when I knew what to search on Google found only one reference from 2007 [8]...

harder & harder to remove unwanted...: Apple Support Communities

... I can still crop bits from my events and send those bits to the trash BUT doing so converts the underlying DV movies into .MOV files and DOES modify the quality of the video. I'm not sure if it's significantly worse quality, but I can do a side by side comparison of the original DV and the MOV file that iMovie 08 insists on making if I delete bits permanently from my events and there IS a difference...

... However, they get "squeezed" for some reason, as you pointed out, so that when played directly (i.e. from Finder in QuickTime) they get reduced from their real/original 853x480 to a smaller, squished 720x480...

Even in that thread the participants missed that DV (MPEG-2) is lossy compression; the reassurances were misplaced.

Someday I'll have to see what Final Cut Pro X does. iMovie's callous recompression doesn't give me warm and fuzzy feelings. (Admittedly, nothing about Apple gives me warm and fuzzy feelings any more.)

[1] For the rest of the current series over the past week or two, see:

• How should I transcode my home analog video? 2/13/2012
• iMovie 11 and analog to digital videotape conversion by passthrough
• MPEG Streamclip video converter as Compressor alternative
• Mac mass storage for video archiving - options
• Video: The state of compression is not good. Blame it on Congress. 2/18/2012 (and, perhaps, soon we can blame Google)
• iMovie 11 does not completely import iMovie HD projects

[2] I'd swear one of the capture UIs I used appeared to show stereo. I think the problem was that the Canon STV-250N video cable only looks standard; I think it flips an audio and video input. So one audio was going to the video channel, but since I was using an S-video cable I didn't see this. I'd long ago mixed that cable with others, and it took some detective work and web image study to identify it.
[3] DV-25 technically, though I believe that label conceals a wide variety of messiness including variations in codec version, variations in metadata, variations in sound encoding, differences in 'pixel aspects', interlacing variations and so on. 
[4] Maybe it always does all clips in an Event. I don't know. In this case the Event was a single 10GB clip and it was entirely re-encoded. I also don't know if this continues to happen after the initial DV/MOV reencoding, perhaps iMovie can work with some forms of DV more directly.
[5] Quite lossy by still image standards. It feels comparable to 60% compressed JPEG, so a single re-encoding cycle causes noticeable damage. I have a theory that low compression MPEG-4 (30 Mbps+ data rates) is less lossy than DV, but saying this tends to enrage video "experts" in Apple's Discussion groups.
[6] It looks like I'm going to be running through each A to D conversion an average of 2.5 times. If I could travel back in time two weeks I'd send me to a commercial A to D conversion service.
[7] Aperture does something similar, albeit less obnoxious. Even if you don't edit a JPEG image, if you export it as JPEG Aperture always decompresses and recompresses. There's no intelligent export of the original.
[8] Not the point of this post, but this bit of the thread helps explain why video work is so nasty (more on formats some other day) ...

... QuickTime always reports two dimensions, the native format size — 720x480 — and the playback display size, shown in parenthesis, e.g. "(853x480)". The native size is measured in non-square pixels and the display size in square pixels. (Or is it the other way around?)

.. Throughout the history of QuickTime the playback of DV video has evolved from always displaying it as 720x480 — which confused viewers because the pixel shape of DV caused the video to appeared "stretched" — to adjusting the playback display to 640x480 for 4:3 video and 853x480 for 16:9 video. Sometimes QT doesn't choose the display size we expect, but that shouldn't affect the size or quality of the underlying video. (To force the video to use the aspect ratio we want so it looks right, QuickTime Pro lets us adjust the display size, just like we used to adjust all 720x480 DV to play as 640x480.) ..

Pinboard and IFTTT to Twitter

A few weeks after Google 2.0 killed Google Reader Social, I decided I'd take the Twitter route.

My Twitter feed was active for about two months, but in time I gave up on Twitter (again). It didn't work as a memory management solution, I don't like the length limit and the lack of structure, and I don't expect Twitter to take better care of my data than Google. Worst of all, like Google, Twitter is free. I can't afford free.

Next I ran through PosterousandTumblr. They both failed, for different reasons. Worst of all, both are too expensive.

Lastly, I turned to Pinboard. I thought I'd use it restore access to my Google Reader JSON exports -- but that didn't work. I could have gotten my $10 back, but I like Pinboard's style, microblog post formats, export formats, import options, ownership, feed-focus, and bookmarklet -- and I really like the Reeder (and, via SendTo, Reader) integration. Most of all, I like paying for it. Oh, and it's Google-Free too [2].

So I've stayed with Pinboard. I tag my (all public) posts with 1 tap codes that are meaningful only to me - s for share, b for blogworthy, y for yammworthy. Each tag has its own stream. The 's' stream is really aimed at Emily, but anyone can consume it. It shows up in her copy of Reeder.app and on her iGoogle page.

No, it's not Google Reader Social. Then again, nothing is. I've come to think of GR Social as a future-fluke, a transient window into a future that might never be. Pinboard isn't GRS, but it's the best microblog/share platform in the mundane world. It beats the heck out of Twitter and (shudder) G+.

Except Twitter, despite my neglect, refuses to die. So I decided to try injecting my Pinboard shares into the Twitter stream. Pinboard doesn't support this, and they don't intend to. However IFTT supports both Pinboard and Twitter, so I now tweet from Pinboard via IFTTT (recipe) [1]

For example:

• Original in Pinboard: Pinboard: Bookmark Detail
• Format in Twitter: Twitter / @jgordonshare: Information Technology Cog ...: ""

It mostly seems to work, though I don't know what happens if my Descriptions are too long.

For the moment then, I share the same items in two places:

• Pinboard 's' with feed.
• Twitter - jgordonshare

[1] In my own task I have a colon between Title and Description, otherwise they run together in Twitter.
[2] Is it Google's ambition to be more disliked than AT&T?

iTunes Playlist havoc - where did they go?

(The moral of this story - be very careful about following old web recipes for iTunes hackery. The app has changed a great deal in recent releases.)

The original:

It's been a long time since iTunes caused me much trouble, but something's gone wrong recently. Several playlists were missing. I followed the standard procedure for playlist recreation (reference deleted, see [1]). I didn't recover anything, but now most of my many, many Smart Albums are broken.

Be interesting to find out if this is simply my bad luck or something went bad in a recent iTunes update.

Nothing for it but to slowly clean up, wistfully parting with more more hours feeding the beast. I'll try restoring from an a month old playlist XML file via Time Machine and see if I get better results.

I suspect they're not long for the world anyway. Apple is overdue to gut iTunes, and replace it with some simple app that will omit most of what I use.

Update: Oh, great. TIme Machine does not backup iTunes Library.xml. Good thing I have offsite backups using Carbon Copy Cloner. Did I mention Apple gives me hives? In theory we're not supposed to need it, but in this case without that file I have no Playlists at all. Certainly feels like something is broken....

[1] Updateb: It got worse. All my apps were missing too, and all my purchases. At that point I bailed. I pulled my CCC backup to protect it, then told Time Machine to restore iTunes Library, iTunes Library Extras.itdb and iTunes Library Genius.itdb from 1 hour before I started messing around. Things returned to normal; iTunes Library.xml was recreated as it should be. I'm still missing a couple of Playlists, but at least I haven't lost everything.

So I can't say what happened to a few of my ITunes Playlists, but I can say one should be very cautious about trying to recreate a playlist using the method of removing iTunes Library and importing from iTunes Library.xml.

Updatec: Looks like there's more material missing - including several audiobooks! .... Time Machine shows everything was there an hour ago. It's almost as though, when I was trying to restore my playlists, iTunes actually went and removed ... content. I've never seen anything quite like this. I am going to run some disk check software then try restoring my entire iTunes Library from last night's disk clone.

Updated: I think I figured out what happened to the Audiobooks -- and probably other content. It went something like this:

1. During my ill-fated attempts to restore the wee missing Playlists, I caused iTunes to review all content without any genre settings I'd made.
2. During the review iTunes decided that some old Audiobooks taken from CD and specified as audiobook, were in fact music. iTunes reorganized them into music (I found them there using Spotlight.)
3. When I restored the iTunes database it didn't know about the new location, so the content went missing.

I finally restored from a backup of the previous night and brought everything back. I recreated the mysteriously lost playlists. The loss was never explained.