During my last trip to France, I bought a french prepaid sim card to reduce costs. However, it didn't pay.
At the time being, you can only buy sim cards without internet access unless you are ready to buy a subscription.[1] However, not being able to access the internet doesn't stop your IPhone from trying. And each try costs a few cents. You can easily avoid this by just switching the "mobile data" option off. It cost my a few bucks until I found out... at first, I wondered why calls are that expensive in France :).
Oh, and there's a weird thing to add: sometimes the IPhone does get access to the internet. My IPhone surprised me with the latest breaking news when I was contemplating the amphitheatre of Orange - exactly here:
- I have to admit I only asked at the Orange shop, so I may have missed another telephone company's offer. I didn't find such an offer during my internet inquiry, but chances are I missed it due to my limited command of the French language. Anyways, I' pretty sure the situation is going to improve soon: There are quite a few tourists who want their IPhone to be a smartphone while being reluctant to pay roaming fees. I guess next year the corresponding sim card will be ubiquitous.↩