For quite awhile I’ve been keeping an eye out for a deal on a first generation iPhone and I finally found one. My buddy Cory originally bought an iPhone as soon as they were released in the US and had it imported. When the new iPhone 3G came out he jumped at the opportunity to get a new 16gb version, so I ended up being lucky enough to be able to buy it off him for about $150. Safe to say I was quite happy about that.

I already owned an iPod Touch and found that I loved that device so much that I pretty much took it everywhere. I found that having a music player that was Wi-Fi enabled just became indispensable. The problem I had was now that I took my iPod everywhere, I no longer carried my Virgin phone with me, as there is really only so much real estate available in my pockets so something had to give. I’m a very light cell phone user(less then $10 a month with Pay As You Go), so it really became hard to justify carrying it with me.

Now that I have an iPhone, I had to choose a carrier. Virgin uses Bell’s CDMA network, so if I wanted to use the iPhone I had to switch to either Rogers or Fido’s GSM network. Both offer Pay As You Go options. I found Fido did have better rates on month to month basis, but I discovered Rogers had a deal that worked perfectly for a light user like myself. If you purchase a $100(+tax) top up card from a Rogers store the balance lasts for a whole year. That worked out to be even cheaper then what I was paying with with Virgin ($30 for 3 months x 4=$120 a year+tax).

When I went into the Rogers Plus store in Cambridge they thought I was crazy to setup an iPhone as Pay As You Go. I think so many people are confused about how the data usage on an iPhone works. Given the fact I already own an iPod Touch I’m well aware that there are open Wi-Fi networks pretty much everywhere these days. Having Data access would have been handy, but at this point it’s pretty cost prohibitive for someone like myself who doesn’t spend a lot on a cell phone. Going from $10 a month to $60 is a pretty big leap just for easy data access. So when they setup my phone I was opted out of all data related services, which was fine by me.

All told getting an iPhone setup and running didn’t really cost me any more then buying my last phone through Virgin. I even bought my sim card off of eBay for $7.