Best way to buy an iPhone?

[mattkime]

its easy enough to unlock the phone but do you think they will give you the DATA plan without a contract?

[davester]

I could be wrong, but I think that contracts only apply to AT&T -purchased phones. You can almost certainly get a month to month bring-your-own-phone plan and add data to it without purchasing a phone...or you can buy a similar plan from T-mobile. I think this is pretty common now. The only difference would be that since you are getting a regular data plan rather than the iphone data plan you won't get the visual voicemail feature.