T-Mobile is, rather famously, dead last among the Big Four cell phone providers. Just as famously, it is also the only one of the Big Four cell phone providers to not have the iPhone. This is for many reasons, most of them to do with the fact that so far, Apple just laughs whenever Deutsche Telekom calls them.
But T-Mobile is not giving up hope! Maybe you paid for an unlocked iPhone! Maybe you didn’t sign up with one of its three competitors already! Maybe, just maybe, you want to put your iPhone on T-Mobile! So if you’re one of those five people, good news: T-Mobile has a nano-SIM for you!
The really pathetic thing about all of this is that the suckers who actually do this will quickly discover the reason the iPhone isn’t on T-Mobile: Its network.
Since the vast majority of T-Mobile’s HSPA+ (“4G”) network runs on the AWS band — a band which no iPhones support — you’ll be stuck at far slower 2G speeds in most of the country. The carrier has begun offering iPhone-friendly 1900MHz HSPA+ service in parts of Seattle, Las Vegas, and the New York metro area, which are the only spots where you’ll get faster service.
As in 3G. So you’ll have the phone of the future, working on what was the mobile speed of the future in 2006.
Adding insult to injury, T-Mobile only has one data plan that won’t throttle your data once you cross a certain threshold. So basically, if you have some sort of moral objection to Sprint, and hate Verizion enough not to use their network but not enough to buy an unlocked phone from them, you can be on T-Mobile’s network at slow, crappy speeds unless you live in one of three cities, which have slightly less crappy speeds.
Yeah, don’t ship out too many nano-SIMs, guys.