SIM-free Iphone 4 - what can't it do?

[IO540]

I avoid Apple stuff personally (no use for what I need to do) but my girlfriend saw an Iphone4 and loved it, so I ordered an unlocked one for her birthday :) £450 or so from the Apple shop.

She is on Virgin (the only network offering PAYG with auto-topup) and I have bought a £10 tool on Ebay to cut down the SIM card to the required size.

She will use it only as a basic phone but I wonder whether it can be used as a bluetooth modem as well? I know the Iphone 3 could not, definitely not if bought from say O2, and I know the reasons. I am sure an O2-branded Iphone4 cannot be tethered either without jailbreaking it. But the Apple website suggests tethering is OK for the Iphone 4.

Anyway there is stuff like this (http://www.iphoneunlockuk.com/app_package.php) to get around it... but it is not clear if this is needed in this case.

Are there any other gotchas?

I have heard reports of some SIM cards being blocked from working on an Iphone...

Virgin offer something like 25MB/day for 30p which will do all the basic online stuff.

[Crashpad]

Tethering is not allowed in the T&C's of all the majors for obvious reasons.....
Virgin are not the only PAYG offering auto top up.....
Check this out.....giffgaff - Unlimited Texts & Unlimited Web with our Free SIM cards (http://giffgaff.com/) I use them with iPhone and everything works on the O2 network but with unlimited data......Have a read through the community forums before making a decision...There are no call centres all the problems are sorted on the forums by the community and 'Agents' on line.

[Keef]

Tethering was allowed with the previous contracts I was on. The iPhone was the first to have a "block" on tethering.

Strangely, the price for an O2 tethering bolt-on is about twice the price of a Voda dongle, so ...

[IO540]

I am not bothered about Ts & Cs. I can see that a network provider offering a large 'free' data bundle is not going to like tethering if some kid is downloading a few GB but that is not a normal person's usage pattern.

All that concerns me is whether it actually works or not.

I have never seen any evidence that any network is looking at the data for indications of tethering. One insider told me that they might, in cases of heavy usage only. Any algorithm would throw up a lot of false positives because modern phones can run much the same apps as PCs, and if you run a VPN then nothing at all is going to be visible to the network.

From what I have found so far, the unlocked Iphone 4, with the latest IOS, does indeed support tethering via bluetooth. Whether the network likes it or not is not Apple's problem because they sold the phone SIM-free :)

[call100]

They may not be able to tell if tethering is actually happening but if you do the likelihood is that you will breach the FUP fairly quickly.
As far as I know an unlocked iPhone 4 can be used for tethering via BlueTooth and USB.

[Compass Call]

What is 'Tethering' ?

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[Mike-Bracknell]

What is 'Tethering' ?

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The use of a phone as a 3G modem over bluetooth (et al) between it and a laptop.