Updated 26-Nov-2010 The Web Daypass now works on all phones including Android devices.
T-Mobile introduced a new Web Day Pass option for its prepaid users this week. It provides 24 hours of unlimited data access for $1.49. While its a little pricey for everyday use, it should come in handy for travelers or anyone else needing to use data occasionally. To activate the day pass you just open the browser and try to load a page and you will be asked if you want to buy a DayPass.
I tested it on an Nokia N8 Symbian smartphone. As soon as I opened my browser the prompt (first image, above) appeared and a few clicks latter (images, above - click the thumbnails to vew full size) the Web DayPass was active (image, below) and my prepaid Balance was $1.49 lighter. With the DayPass active all the data aware apps on the N8 including Mail, Social, Ovi and Google Maps and Opera Mini and Mobile worked normally. The Broadband Reports mobile speed test reported a very decent download speed of 1859 kbit/s on T-Mobile's HSPA+ network. The DayPass doen't auto-renew, you have to reactivate after 24 hours to keep using it
While T-mobile's site appears to indicate that the DayPass is available for any device on any prepaid plan, the operator doesn't seem to want you to use Android handsets with it. At least when I tried with a Google Ion, which is a Google developer phone version of T-Mobile's MyTouch 3G, I got the "Subscription Upgrade Required" message shown at right. Clicking the "Please click here..." link just reloaded the page as did the other four links on the page.
I tried without success to get around the message by trying every possible combination of 3G on, 3G off, switching between T-Mobile's T-Mobile's two prepaid APNs; epc.tmobile.com and wap.voicestream.com and trying to go through the T-Mobile prepaid account page at wap.t-zones.com/myaccount or wap.myvoicestream.com. No matter what I tried I couldn't get past that unhelpful message.
I called T-Mobile support and after being transfered several times by T-Mobile prepaid reps who couldn't figure out why I couldn't activate a Web DayPass on the Ion, a customer support supervisor stated that the Web DayPass is not available on Android phones.
Blocking Android seems like a strange restriction. Sure, Android phones can use a lot of data, but so can Symbian, Windows Mobile, Maemo and iOS phones. I don't know about other smartphones but based on my experience the DayPass works on at least one Symbian phone, the Nokia N8.
When I swapped the DayPass enabled SIM into the Ion data worked on it too so at least there is a workaround if you have an extra phone and don't mind swapping SIMs. It's certainly possible for T-Mobile to close that loophole if they really don't want Android devices using the DayPass so enjoy it while you can. The year and a half old Ion doesn't support HSPA+ so I only got 570 kbit/s with it but that's still a respectable 3G speed.
Update: 26-Nov-2010: After hearing reports of other users being able to purchase a Day Pass using T-Mobile Android phones, I tried to enable on my Google Ion Android phone again today. When I first tried to go to the T-Mobile My Account page I got:
"Error Unknown
You homepage is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later."
After retrying several times I was finally able to get to the homepage and purchase a Daypass and data worked fine except that I still got "Error Unknown" most of the time when I tried to access My Account.
On their postpaid monthly data plans, there's a 5GB "soft"cap. Once you exceed 5 GB in a month your speed is throttled to about 64 kbit/s. I'm suspect there is a similar soft cap on the Web DayPass although I don't know what it is. There have been reports on various user forums from users claiming that they have been throttled after they have used anywhere from 30 MB to 150 MB in a day. 150 MB is pretty reasonable (the 5GB monthly cap divided by 30 is 170 MB) but 30 MB is pretty low considering that many desktop web pages are over one MB. I haven't been throttled yet and I neglected to check my data counter before activating the DayPass, but I'll try testing the limits tomorrow and update this post when I hit the soft cap.
Update 24-Oct-2010: T-Mobile mentions a 30 MB daily soft cap on the Terms and Conditions page that you click though when activating a DayPass. After 30 MB, download speed is supposed to be slowed. I tested that by downloading over 200 MB and I don't seem to have encountered the cap. Even after 200 MB I was getting speeds in the 300-500 kbit/s range. While that's slower than the best speed (1859 kbit/s) I saw, it's still 3G performance. The slowdown could as easily be due to network load or atmospheric conditions (it was clear at the beginning of the test when I got the best speeds and raining at the end) as to any capping.
1. Cleared all cache and history.
2. switch to desktop mode, not Iphone or IE6 or android
3. Again Cleared cache and history
4. closed all browser windows (menu, windows, hit "x") to fresh windows
This then gave me a new home page (google) and I was browsing right away. Even with out having to subscribe to it.
I verified I was not on WiFi then on my PC checked my Account and found a $1.49 charge to account.
It must of worked for me as I did this without having to do anything after clearing cache and choosing the Desktop Browser feature of my version of Android software.
Hope this Help All...
I think the APN's I used might have had an effect - I originally started using the wap.voicestream.com one but switched to epc.tmobile.com and I think that might have made the t-zones pages more reliable, unfortunately I didn't have time to test things.
Either way, I don't think they are deliberately blocking Android, it's just very flakey for some reason.
i dont know what i did but i logged into tzones first and then to my tmobile and now my web gaurd is off. strange
http://m.web2go.com/myaccount/summary.do
You will be able to see your account plus enable the webday pass.
Hope I brightened some users day. I'm happy to get the webpasss back!
-Joseph
http://m.web2go.com/myaccount/hourpasssubscribe.do
Will hook you up for the day for $1.50. Thank you Dennis for this blog and thank you for pointing out the original post was not enough.
phew...
-Joseph
Did you try spoofing the browser user agent to a non-Android device before the first Web access that leads to the activation of a daypass, then resetting it to the correct user agent after completion of the activation procedure? Of course, if the activation relies upon some information as the IMEI, this would not work.
It's funny, it works on my iPhone 3GS, but not on a TMobile Android phone.
However, I just tried using Dolphin with the user agent set to that of the iPhone and it behaved the same as with the normal Android User Agent and I wasn't able to get to the DayPass registration page. I suspect that T-Mobile is checking the phone's IMEI.
For now the only I've found to use the DayPass with my Google Ion Android phone is to activate the pass with another phone and then swap the SIM to the Android device.