BigTinCan in San Francisco

So its DEVCON time again, and we are in San Francisco (well today in University Ave, Palo Alto).

Its going to be a great ride with lots of news about new BlackBerry products already in the rumour mill - check out this story on Engadget reported initially on the WSJ.

Its also a great chance for me to "eat my own cooking" , as I am using all the features of BigTinCan Connect this trip. So far so good.

What I have done is forwarded my Aussie mobile number to a BTC inbound number in Australia and then pointed that number at my ATT prepaid SIM card (that is not sitting nicely in either my Bold 9700 or iPhone - depending on what apps I want to run;). So people at home can call my mobile and it will ring here in the USA - but even better I have created a time of day rule that means that people who call me outside of normal hours here in the West Coast will just get sent to a voice mail - which is then sent to my email.

Then from my ATT SIM I have setup BigTinCan Connect to add this number as my callback number - so now when I call Australia I am calling at US domestic incoming rates. Pretty cool huh! Oh and it shows my Australian mobile number as the caller ID when I call someone in Aus - so they know its me!

COST?

I purchased a $25 pre paid credit pack for my SIM here.

I then used $4.99 of that credit to purchase a 1Mb data pack - to send the call requests to the BTC server.

And now I've got $20 left over for the minutes - which actually gives me plenty of minutes for the calls.

Compared with roaming charges this is going to save me I think hundreds of dollars!

I will post back here on my experiences with the US cell phone network - but for now its working great!