iPhone 3G - Hicken Design

A few years ago I wrote a post on using the iPhone with Consumer Cellular. A lot of people commented on it so in this post, I’ll sum it up for people looking to use this excellent priced voice and data service on the excellent iPhone or iPad!

1. Is this Right For Me?

If you expect technical support from your cell phone provider for your phone (the actual device), this is probably not a good idea for you. The moment you tell Consumer Cellular that you are using an iPhone or an iPad, they will likely tell you that they cannot provide support. If you are ok with this, I lower my staff of warning and allow you to pass into a world of greater freedom. After over 2 years of using an iPhone with Consumer Cellular, I’ve never had to call them for support on anything except to enable my data plan (see step 4).

You must have a GSM (the AT&T version) iPhone or iPad for this to work. How do you check? Look for the sim card tray on the top or on the side of the device. It will have a small pin hole used to eject the tray.

2. The Sim Card

If you are planning to use the iPad, or the iPhone 4 or newer, you’ll need to cut your sim card down to the size of a micro sim card. There are plenty of articles on the web about how to do that. I won’t cover it here because it’s quite easy to do.

3. Voice and Text

The good news is that you don’t need to jailbreak or unlock your iPhone or iPad to use it on Consumer Cellular! Their service rides on AT&T’s network. ~~so devices automatically activate when the sim card is inserted~~. You may need to connect to iTunes the first time you activate your device. But after that, Voice and Text (SMS) just work. If you desire to get data working you’ll need to take a few more steps. If you don’t care about data, you’re done!

4. Enable Data with Consumer Cellular

If you purchased a Consumer Cellular phone that supports data, you can skip this step. If not, your sim card needs to be provisioned for data. Basically, Consumer Cellular needs to flip a switch on their end to activate data for you. Login to the Consumer Cellular website to see if this is already done for you.

After you login, click the Change Services link on the right side of the page.

Scroll down a bit to the “Messaging and Data” section. If data is enabled for your sim card the Data (Web) checkbox will be checked.

If you previously used a Consumer Cellular phone that didn’t support data or it does not appear to be activated on their website, you can call customer service (1-888-345-5509) and let them know that you’ve purchased a used AT&T phone which supports data and ask them to enable data for your sim card. ~~If you tell them it is an iPhone/iPad you will likely be denied.~~ Since the original writing of this article, Consumer Cellular has begun reselling the iPhone 3G so there should be no issues here but it may take a day or so for the provisioning to go into effect.

5. Enable Data on Your iDevice

The easiest way to enable data is to visit unlockit.co.nz from Safari on your iPad or iPhone. Note that the site looks very different on a desktop so you have to visit it from your iDevice. When you browse to the site, you’ll find that it’s a simple step-by-step wizard. We’re going to change your APN or Access Point Name to the correct address for Consumer Cellular.

Open the site on your iDevice and select Custom APN to change the address of your data network.

Select Consumer Cellular as the carrier and then tap Email Profile.

Enter your iPhone or iPad email address and tap Email the Profile. This email must be opened on your iDevice to continue.

Open the email that was sent to you and tap the settings.mobileconfig attachment.

Tap Install to install this profile and update your APN.

After the profile is successfully installed, you may need to toggle airplane mode on and then back off again. Do this from from the Settings app (Settings > Airplane Mode). In some instances you will need to power down your iDevice completely and then power it back up.

Should you ever need to uninstall the profile, you can find it in the Settings app (Settings > General > Profile).

Ensure that you’ve enabled data in the Settings app (Settings > General > Network). Turn on Enable 3G and Cellular Data. If you are in an area where the 3G network is not good, you should still be able to use the old Edge network by disabling 3G. It is much slower but also consumes less power.

You can test your cellular data by disabling Wi-Fi (Settings > Wi-Fi > Wi-Fi).

6. MMS

At this point, everything should be working except for MMS (Picture and Video messaging). Unfortunately this is where things get more complicated. If you wish to enable MMS, your iDevice must be jailbroken and you will need to install the appropriate version of the CommCenter Patch. Then you will need to manually update the remainder of the data network profile settings in your Carrier.plist file. You can find more information on this topic at my previous post.

7. Consider a donation

I hope this post saves you a lot of money on your cell phone service! Leave a comment and let us know about your experience with Consumer Cellular on your iDevice!

If this saves you money, please consider donating. This will allow us to continue to provide quality content.

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I recently purchased an iPhone 3GS that had a cracked back housing. I found a replacement part on eBay for $18 shipped. I found a nice 720p youtube video that really helped my confidence before disassembling the iPhone.

Replacing the back is probably the most difficult repair you can make to the iPhone. It requires that you take everything apart except the front assembly (glass/digitizer). The repair took about 2 hours. It will be much quicker next time (yah, I’ll probably help other people fix their phones too) since I know what I’m doing now. After putting everything back together, I ran into a few problems, one of which had me very nervous for a bit. Here’s how it went down…

I replaced the back and closed up the iPhone. Then I discovered that my sim card was not getting recognized. It was as if the iPhone didn’t even know when I ejected and reinserted the card (which turned out to be the case). Then I did something stupid. I got distracted. 🙁 I forgot to completely power down the iPhone before I opened it again. I discovered the sim problem but there wasn’t much I could do about it because upon reconnecting the LCD and front assembly and closing the iPhone I could hit the power or home button which would light up the screen but it would only light up black. It was like the motherboard was not sending data to the screen. I will admit that at this point I was a little worried. I thought I might have damaged the motherboard somehow but I knew that it had been working only moments before and I thought it unlikely that disconnecting the LCD while the iPhone was on would really do any damage. I started thinking worst case scenario, I have to buy a new motherboard ($100 to $150). Not the end of the world but certainly one of the most expensive mistakes I’ve ever made with electronics.

So now I had 2 problems to solve and this was supposed to be a 20 minute project! I had another hunch that shutting down the iPhone and rebooting with everything attached might solve the LCD problem and it did! The only problem was that I couldn’t figure out a way to shut down the iPhone since the digitizer was unresponsive and I couldn’t see anything on the screen. I decided to disassemble everything again to disconnect the battery. Then I reconnected everything and rebooted and the LCD problem went away. Yay!

There is an easier way to shut off the iPhone without taking everything apart. The battery connects to the motherboard via 2 contact points on its back side. When looking at the front of the board they are in the bottom right area just south of the vibrator. You can unscrew the 3 motherboard screws along the right edge of the board and loosen the ones on the left side. Then you can gently lift the motherboard on the right side which will disconnect the contact points. Keep it disconnected for a good 10 seconds to let the motherboard clear out.

Finally I was ready to tackle the sim card problem. Earlier when I opened the iPhone looking for the problem with the sim card I noticed that the motherboard mounts a hair lower in the new back housing preventing the sim card activation circuit from opening. This seemed strange to me since I know that this is an OEM part. How could it be that different? But take a look at the picture…

With the sim tray fully inserted, it didn’t press the tiny v-shaped wire that opens the circuit. Every time this circuit is opened the iPhone tries to recognize the sim card. After pondering on the problem for a bit, I decided that it would be better to modify the sim tray than the wire on the motherboard. After all, if I messed up, sim trays are cheap. I ended up cutting a tiny sliver off of the end of an old gift card. It was the only thing I could find around the house that was thin enough. I super-glued it to the sim tray which worked out nicely…

Tag: iPhone 3G

How To Setup Your iPhone or iPad on Consumer Cellular