iPhone Question: Sharing w/ 1 Apple ID - three phones

[retrosportsgamer]

I have an iPhone 4 and we are adding a 4s for both my wife and father-in-law to our existing plan. While the standard approach would be different apple IDs for each phone (everyone has their own non-Mac laptop also), I was asked what it would be like to share one ID so all purchases are pooled (and would remain under my current billing setup) so I'm doing my due dilligence.

From the prelim info I've gathered, the crux of this is creating separate cloud accounts for each phone so information like contacts, messages, etc would not be synched to everyone's phones. I guess this would all be set up through iTunes.

So my question is - is this easy? What are some of the other benefits and potential issues I may not be considering?

Thanks.

[SamuraiMegas]

It's easy.
Just sign in on the store.
The only problem is, you share ALL purchases.

[the King]

I currently do this with 4 apple devices(2 iphones and 2 ipads) and you can turn off and on anything you want to share on each device. You can even turn off sharing purchases and later go and add something another device has already purchased. As far as I can gather your emails, messages, etc have nothing to do with cloud sharing.

[retrosportsgamer]

Thanks King - what if you don't use the Cloud? Is this something you can still note on what you want synched? I think the big thing is I didn't really want my existing email pushed out to both of their phones. And does it make a difference because each would use their own iTunes setup on their own PC?

[the King]

Your email has nothing to do with itunes or anything apple. you set it up each phone with your email provider(gmail, yahoo, etc). They won't get your emails and you won't get theirs.

[Metal Jesus]

I've ran into the annoying thing where I will get my wife's iPhone iMessages TEXTs and vice versa. However, I went into settings and removed her phone number from my iPad and that seems to keep things separate...

[retrosportsgamer]

Thanks everybody - very helpful. I think I have a handle on this within the settings on the devices.