If the dude's gonna have to invest over $100 on
yet another device on top of an iPhone, he'd be better off investing in an offline car GPS, then he can avoid the data usage costs altogether. Probably the best solution anyway, financially.
Dedicated car GPS (<$100), refurbished and unlocked iPhone 3GS with a new battery ($150-200), T-Mobile's
$30 1500 Talk & Text or H2O's
$25 1000 minute or text package might be a good combo. The extra $5 a month would probably be well worth the better customer support and extra cushion going with TMo, and should work plenty fine if data usage without the GPS stays under 30MB a month.
The TMo plan and the lower equipment cost
almost makes breaking contract with Sprint cost effective. Almost. Of course, the 3GS will likely get left out in the cold next major iOS revision update. That's the price of using Apple products, though: Planned obsolescence, hefty prices and no CRU parts.
Thank you, I.P. Daley. I obviously have not made it all the way through the Superguide (my apologies). StraightTalk works for my wife's occasional mobile data usage, but I will definitely need to investigate what may be better options.
No worries, and yeah, that'd be a pretty good idea. As you can tell, the Walmart set
loves America Movil's products and will frequently make excuses for their shortcomings... but you branch out into the wider world of MVNOs and prepaid and price for what you actually
need instead of getting suckered by the "unlimited" marketing tactics, there's far better service and support to be had for the money. You'll also find that most of the competition doesn't need ridiculous 20,000 word Terms of Service contracts to define acceptable service usage or as a means to justify their business practices.