This is a bit of a long story. If you're thinking of purchasing a Nexus 4 from Google or trying to activate an unlocked phone on the T-Mobile network, you may find it useful. If not, then... eh. Don't bother reading the epic.
My prior phone was an HTC Incredible running on the Verizon network. I got it just when the Incredible was released, about 2 1/2 years ago, and it was a great phone. Verizon was so-so, but since my company was picking up the bill I didn't care too much that it was expensive, especially for the data rates and voice quality. Well, things change. I no longer work for my previous company, was a consultant during the summer paying for my own phone bill, and now work for another company that doesn't pay the cell phone bill. So I was motivated to find a much cheaper plan and try to get a better phone in the process.
I read the rumors and pre-release specs for the Nexus 4 and given it's amazingly low price, it was a no-brainer. I pre-registered for the purchase directly from Google and waited for the second that they went on sale, on-line. After confirming the purchase and receiving an e-mail from Google to that effect, I figured it was in the bag. A few days later the Nexus 4 still hadn't shipped and Google sent a follow up e-mail saying it would ship in two weeks. The consolation prize being that Google would pick up the $15 shipping fee. I would have preferred to get the Nexus 4 on time as promised and pay the shipping, but two weeks isn't too terrible a wait. The major annoyance was being told the new phone would be on my doorstep any day and then having the story change after the fact. Luckily I wasn't about to deactivate my Verizon Incredible before the Nexus 4 was up and running.
Waiting two weeks for the phone to arrive gave me plenty of time to find the best cellular network plan. A big advantage of having an unlocked phone is being able to shop all the carriers that support your phone's channels: GSM for the Nexus 4. In the United States it can use the carriers T-Mobile, AT&T or any of the smaller GSM carriers. If you spend even five minutes comparing plans you'll find that pre-paid plans are substantially cheaper than contract plans, by about a half to a third. There are some small service differences such as pre-paid plans usually don't support WiFi hot-spots, but that wasn't important to me. After even more investigation I found that Walmart had negotiated the best deal around with T-Mobile: $32.88/month (all taxes & surcharges included) for unlimited data and text, 100 talk minutes. Not bad considering my previous plan with Verizon with identical services except 500 talk minutes was $98/month, including taxes and surcharges.
As promised, about two weeks later my new Nexus 4 arrived. It's a beautiful phone and if you want to learn more about it, read the C-Net and other reviews. I agree with most of what they say, with one caveat. The reviews panned the Nexus 4's lack of LTE. Well, T-Mobile's pseudo-LTE is plenty fast for me. I'm not trying to copy huge DVD files from my phone, so who cares? I did try watching HD quality movies from Netflix on the Nexus 4 and it worked great, even in my basement. Same with streaming audio. However, getting the data network working on T-Mobile was not obvious...
When the phone first arrived I didn't have a SIM card or carrier service set up yet. I figured I could just take it to a Walmart store and have them set it up (how wrong I was, more on that in the next paragraph). To play around with it out of the box, I turned on the Nexus 4's WiFi. It was great; as I said before it's an awesome phone. To test a voice call I tried using Skype and Google Voice; figured it should work over the WiFi connection. Wrong! You must have a cell carrier network to get Google Voice to work, or a not-free service like Talkatone. Bummer. At least I could play with all the Android app store programs and on-line Google services for music, notes, calendars, etc. It was really easy to get the phone sync'ed with my existing Google account. It pulled in my contact list, e-mail, calendar, music, etc. Brilliant.
Next day it was time to get the Nexus 4 connected to the T-Mobile network on the Walmart plan. I walked into the local Walmart and hunted for five minutes, looking for someone to man the vacant cell phone help desk. After finding someone, they first decided to help a desperate mother of four find, unlock and purchase a Wii game, (as a father of three I empathize) I was finally able to ask my question, "Would you kindly sell me a T-Mobile SIM card." Blank stare. We had to hunt around for another employee who knew what a SIM card was. The second employee said that Walmart didn't sell SIM cards. I assured them that Walmart did and showed them this page on my Verizon Incredible phone. More blank stares and a, "Yah, we don't sell that at this store." Funny, because the Walmart web site said it was in stock at that exact store. Well, it was more than I could take for one day so I happily ran from the store and promptly went on a long bike ride to sooth the nerves.
Another day, another game plan. I started searching the internets for the best way to purchase a T-Mobile SIM card for an unlocked Android phone (I know, you're saying: why didn't you do this first!). I ran into this blog post which basically laid it all out. Walmart unwittingly did me a great service the day before by not knowing what a SIM card was or if they had one. It turns out Walmart only has the larger SIM card size, while the Nexus 4 only supports the newer micro-SIM size. And Walmart sells the SIM card for about $14, while I was able to purchase the micro-SIM directly from T-Mobile on-line for $1.05, including 1-day shipping. Thanks T-Mo!
Monday the next week my micro-SIM card arrived. I inserted it into the phone, followed all the instructions, got forwarded to a live operator during the set-up, and then there was an awkward question, "What T-Mobile plan are you purchasing?" Um, none. I'm buying my plan through Walmart. Apparently, the T-Mobile operator had heard this a lot. She asked if it was the $30-unlimited plan. Yup. You can't deny the purchasing power of Walmart; they can even strong-arm the cell carriers. After hanging up with the T-Mobile operator, I went on the Walmart web site and purchased the $30 unlimited plan. Two minutes later I received an e-mail confirming the purchase and a PIN to use the $30 purchase with my specific phone.
The new SIM card was activated, data/text/talk plan was activated, so I switched off the WiFi on the Nexus 4 and started texting and calling. Great! Everything was working and the sound quality was much better than my Verizon Incredible. Now for the internet, Netflix and streaming audio... Nothing! Or actually, "Error: No Network Found." What?! I just paid $30 to get unlimited data for a month. Back to searching the internets. Luckily I found this post on the T-Mobile support site. I manually set the APN to epc.tmobile.com and everything is now working great. And the best part: I paid about $100 more for an unlocked phone (all the latest Android updates) and I'll be saving about $60/month. To me, that's a lot!
Note: If there's any substantial traffic on this page I'll add a few screen shots of how to manually set the APN on the Nexus 4. This is really important to get the data network working because it isn't set up right out of the box.