Using iPhones abroad...

[daihard]

I wonder how it works to use an iPhone abroad, meaning places other than where you bought your iPhone.

For instance, I bought mine in the U.S. AT&T is the phone service provider. If I take it to Japan, where the company named Softbank is the provider, will I still be able to use it as a phone? If so, will I need to pay roaming fees?

Any opinions/advice would be appreciated.

Dai

[jhollington]

You will most definitely pay roaming fees unless you're able to swap out the SIM card for one from a local carrier.

At this point it's not entirely clear exactly how locked down the iPhone 3G is. The original iPhone wouldn't even let you change SIM cards from the same carrier without reactivating the iPhone through iTunes. However, with the iPhone 3G, at least on some carriers (Rogers in my case) this does not appear to be the case.

In fact, my Rogers iPhone 3G will happily take my AT&T SIM card, implying that in the very least it's not locked down to only Rogers.

The only way to know if this is an issue or not would be to test it, of course. However, even if your phone is locked to AT&T, you might be able to get them to unlock it for you. Although there's probably a fee involves to do so, this has got to be less than the cost of International Roaming, which can get very expensive.