I took an iPhone and a Blackberry Curve with me to Indonesia on my latest trip.

The BB Curve is my business phone and I just roam with that so I can receive company email, data, phone calls, etc. (They pay for it.) But I don't carry it around with me. I mainly check it in the morning and evening to see if there was anything urgent at work that would require my attention. I also like to keep the work phone and my cewek contacts on separate devices.

One of the things I wanted to do this trip was to get GPRS or EDGE data working on my iPhone. You do this for the same reason you get a local SIM card. Roaming data charges can be just as expensive or painful as roaming phone call charges. So better just to get a local SIM.

I had looked up the APN (Access Point Name) for Telkomsel before I left, but forgot to write it down and had to look it up again once I arrived.

When I got my SimPATI card on the third floor of the Mangga Dua Square Mall, I could not get GPRS or EDGE data to work.

For what's it worth, here are what the settings should be:

APN: telkomsel
Username: wap
Password: wap123

So I then switched to a Mentari (Indosat) card. Their information was the following:

APN: indosatgprs
Username: indosat
Password: indosat

I also had to text GPRS to 3000 to enable data. But once I did that and I entered the APN settings, I was able to use data on my iPhone.

This worked great on my unlocked iPhone. Youtube worked and it was relatively cheap as well. I think 5 rupiah per certain amount of KB. I seemed to be in EDGE mode, but it didn't seem like EDGE speed. I think I may have seen that Indosat also offers 3G, but I don't have a 3G enabled phone yet. I was also able to pull up Google satellite images of Jakarta on the iPhone and use the Safari web browser.

Overall I am not all that impressed with the iPhone. I am probably going to dump it and get the Nokia N95 8GB. The user interface on the iPhone is awesome and the big screen and touch navigation is way cool, but it lacks a ton of pretty basic features like cut and paste. I jailbroke my phone so the almost unlimited third party apps are pretty cool. For example, there is a "Flashlight" application that turns the screen completely white and it actually gives off a ton of light. This was handy for walking around in the dark places that Jakarta is known for. You can also install instant messengers, a flash card application for studying, and other third party apps that enhance the phone and add features that should have already been built into the device. Like the ability to make an MP3 a ringtone. Luckily SendSong does this quite well.

Anyway, if you want a SIM card with data, I can confirm Indosat's Mentari works and seems cheap. It also came in handy one time as I was halfway out to Kelapa Gading before I realized I didn't have the street address of Sumo. So I whipped out my iPhone, pulled up Google and quickly found the address.

Here is a worldwide list of APN's for other providers if you are interested. Their APN and username/password for Indosat is not correct though. It is what I gave above.

http://www.flexispy.com/Mobile%20APN%20Setting%20to%20use%20GPRS.htm