My wife and I are traveling to Florence and then to Pienza later this month. I have always used my iPhone in Europe and found it to be extremely helpful. The maps work great, and I always find app's which make the trip easier.

However, this time we are not in major cities and I have two questions:

In Tuscany, will the roaming charges get exorbitant for voice and data?

If so, can I prepurchase an Italian sim card with voice and data for an iPhone?

Many thanks,

Racer 042

The roaming charges are pretty ridiculous and in order to swap out sim cards in the iPhone you'll need to unlock it (or jailbreak it) and then you can do that. There are plenty of places on the internet that you can find to do this, it's pretty easy. After doing so, you'll be able to swap out the SIM for an italian one while over there and when you come back home, swap back to your original one and everything will be back to the way it was.

Hope that helps.

You do not want to roam with data. You can easily rack up thousands in roaming data charges in a short period of time.

If you're not going to jailbreak and unlock, you may want to look into renting a Mifi device. You can either buy one at eBay and then get an Italian SIM or rent one from a site like xcomglobal.com.

I did end up using my iphone in Italy. I changed plans to international calling and data, which I had done on two earlier trips to Paris and Italy. I racked up an additional $150 in international roaming charges which I did not anticipate, maybe because we were in rural areas. While I don't particularly like it, it was worth it as I used the iphone extensively.

I am pretty fed up with ATT and will look at jail breaking or an android phone.

You should consider thr Three network - www.tre.it

Their 3Power 10 top-up sim card costs 10 Euros and has 5 euros credit on it. Their tariffs are the best available in my opinion. You should also add some credit so you can get one of the Naviga 3 data options - e.g. 3 euros for 7 days with 100MB of traffic per day. The Three network is one of the best for Skype so you can use Skype for calls back home as well as being reachable.

I've used my own I Phone in Italy and I do not understand the roaming "in rural areas" issue at all. If you are IN Italy then you are ROAMING everywhere!!!

I had a good experience with Wind, paid like 20 Euros for a new SIM and their Mega 100 Ore, which gives you 100 hours of data access in a month.

Coverage was good in Liguria and Lake Como.

scrb11 - the various providers generally have two different packages: either an hour based one or based on MB/GB downloaded.

I generally prefer the download version as it enables you to keep your computer/phone connected all the time so you can receive Skype calls (showing you are available) even though you may not be actually using the device at the time.

Swings and roundabouts I suppose.