Reprinted from TidBITS#1031/14-Jun-2010 with permission. Copyright (C) 2010, TidBITS. All rights reserved. http://www.tidbits.com/ AT&T Allows Eligibility Transfers in Family Plan ------------------------------------------------ by Glenn Fleishman article link: I call my wife, Lynn, "the Early Rejecter." And I don't mean that in a pejorative way. She'd rather have the 2.0 or 3.0 version of some product, and chuckle as I suffer the pain of early upgrades and new hardware. Of course, she's the one in our AT&T Family Plan to be eligible for a low-cost iPhone 4 upgrade, qualifying for the $199 (16 GB) and $299 (32 GB) pricing. My eligibility report says I have to wait until February 2011, or pay an extra $200 ($399 or $499) to get an iPhone 4 now. Fortunately, an AT&T spokesperson confirmed for me that eligibility is transferrable among members of a Family Plan. But it will apparently be impossible to accomplish online. The spokesperson recommended calling AT&T to place an order to work out the details when pre-orders start being accepted on 15 June 2010. To discover your eligibility, go to att.com/iphone and log into your account, or call *639# from the phone you want to upgrade to receive a free text message with a date and more details. Whether AT&T will spot you an early phone trade-up isn't strictly about your contract date, but includes factors such as the service plan and other dollars you've paid them. Some friends who purchased an iPhone 3GS at the same time that I did already qualify for the lowest price. In the past, it was possible to swap SIM cards among phones, transfer phone numbers within the account, or perform other hoodoo to make it work out. But the iPhone 4 uses a micro-SIM, just like the 3G iPad, which means you can't interchange a full-sized SIM from an earlier iPhone with the iPhone 4 (unless you buy one of these SIM cutters). ---- read/post comments: tweet this article: .