I know Blackberries used to come with either GPS or wifi, or for more money, both. I got a bargain refurbished BB with only GPS. Never used the GPS. Could have used the wifi. Sigh.

I don't know whether it has GPS or not. I must have wifi, because my home is in a weak signal area for T-Mobile.

All iphones, and all smart phones, can do wifi. I would stay away from that dealer based on that bad information alone.

Last edited Sat May 25, 2013, 08:29 PM - Edit history (1)

I bought it from Apple & had T-Mobile install the sim card. Works just fine for me.

I will tell you that when I had them do it a couple of months ago, they were not really too well educated on iPhones.

the bottom line is that they brought in the product and did not spend the money to train their people. I was rather irritated with them when I left the store, but it seems to work just fine. I did learn later that you do need to turn them off about once per week and reboot them.

A google search on

yielded several articles which suggest that what the manager at the T-Mobile store told me was not completely wrong. Here are three of the articles:
http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/26/t-mobile-iphone-no-wifi-calling-feature-enabled/
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/26/t-mobile-tiptoes-around-data-throttling-iphone-wi-fi-calling
http://www.slashgear.com/t-mobile-iphone-5-wont-support-wifi-calling-26275325/
I don't understand this stuff. I gather from post #4 that the problem, whatever it is, can be avoided by buying an iPhone from Apple, and then getting a SIM card installed by T-Mobile. Or will this procedure cause some other problem overseas? One reason I chose T-Mobile years ago was that they use GSM, which is (or was) standard in Europe.

Wi-Fi calling is a T-Mobile feature that's primarily used to call internationally. A lot of their phones can't do this.

Download Skype or Google Voice for iPhone to accomplish the same thing.

Or, just use the iPhone as a phone.

You can surf with Wi-Fi, check email, etc just fine.

Thanks for clearing this up. Calling home when I'm overseas is exactly what I need to do - preferably without having to pay an exorbitant fee.

When I looked up "Wi-Fi calling" on Wikipedia, my search was redirected to "Generic Access Network". One problem is that I don't understand the Wikipedia article. Therefore I would like to ask some more naive questions.

When a smart phone doesn't have Wi-Fi calling or something equivalent, does that mean it can be used for web surfing and e-mail, but not phoning, via Wi-Fi?

My current phone is a Blackberry Bold 9700. Whenever I'm connected to Wi-Fi, I can make a phone call. I guess this means I already have Wi-Fi calling. The phone uses GSM and works in Europe. If I call home from Europe using Wi-Fi calling, do I just dial the same number of digits I would use when making a local call at home, or do I have to dial something else (e.g., a country code) first?