International roaming

I'll be traveling to Europe soon and I've called AT&T to have international roaming enabled (just the free standard option, not the $5.99 per month World Traveler).

So I'll be paying per minute ($1.29 voice in France + Italy and $0.02/KB data). Obviously, I want to avoid paying these minutes as much as possible. There is not much I can do about voice, but how do I minimize data usage?

Ideally, I want to stick to WiFi at all times, but I don't think there is a way to disable EDGE and enable WiFi? (Airplane mode turns off BOTH, I assume.)

I read somewhere that you can take the SIM card out and it'll turn the iPhone into an iPod/PDA w/ WiFi device?

Sorry, I can't help you with your questions, but would be interested in any experiences you (or anyone) has had using the various services overseas. How to maximize usage at the lowest cost.

International roaming with global virtual numbers

This is a very useful opportunity for business and individual users who travel a lot to be reachable all the time at very low calling rates.
The idea behind is that any person could be anywhere in the world and his customers,
friends or family members could call him locally without knowing where he is.
Easy 3 steps to register, affordable prices and high calling quality.
Check it out at www.SendMyCall.com
This user-friendly website will help you to get an international virtual number
ringing on any destination worldwide:
*Any regular and mobile phone worldwide
*Any VoIP destination including SIP, IAX and H.323 protocols
*Any Instant Messaging client including Skype, MSN and GTalk

It's a bit of a nightmare.

I don't have an Iphone, but connectionwise my Blackberry behaves the same. It kind of works like this;

2006 - 2 weeks in Europe, rather innocently left the Blackberry connected to everything, surfed the web, left it pulling email as I do at home, blah blah blah.

Come home to a $2,000 bill. Oops.

2007, 2 weeks in Europe. Upgraded the OS on the Blackberry just so I could switch off data. Just left the GSM functionality. Worked fine, no surprises.

When I went to the UK, I bought a prepaid chip from Orange, as I was making a lot of local calls, and it was stupid to keep calling London to London and paying for calls via Brazil. That worked well, although of course you get a new phone number. Data doesn't work at all with those though (as far as I know).