After some discussion last night, hubby and I decided that it would probably be a good idea for me to have a cell phone in case of emergencies. It’s wintertime, and I’m 20 weeks pregnant. My commute goes through residential areas, but I think we would both feel safer if I had a phone, just in case. Also, it will make for easier contact once The Big Day arrives. So, I come to you for your advice.
Can anyone give me personal experiences (either good or bad) with any pre-paid cellular service? Also, I’m going to need to buy a phone. What’s a good, basic phone to have? I don’t care about flip-phones or color screens or ring tones or games - just a phone.
I bought my phone for $100 on Ebay, but you could probably do a lot cheaper just buying it from T-Mobile as part of the package (I wanted mine unlocked for other SIM cards so I can use it overseas).
The service itself is pretty neat if you’re not much of a talker. Once you’ve spent $100 any airtime you add extends your service window to 365 days from now, so if you make no calls it’ll cost next to nothing to keep running. You may find they run specials where this is true even if you haven’t spent $100. That’s what happened to me.
Good idea for a thread–I’ve been thinking of getting a prepaid phone for emergency use, and looking into getting some for my kids to they can use them up and then pay for their own dang minutes. I’ve been looking at Virgin Mobile, but haven’t solidified any opinions.
My SO and I have the T-Mobile family plan - two phones, about 400 minutes per month during business hours and unlimited weekend calls, plus unlimited calls between other T-Mobile phones so our conversations are unlimited 24/7. The whole package, with tax and charges is under $50 a month. We also have it connected to Powernet so we can even make international calls for pennies.
I know the pre-paid sounds good now, but once you have the phone, you will probably start using it and pre-paid can get pricey over the long run.
But if you are absolutely sure you will only make a call or two, and you are sure your husband will be near a land line when you need him, then by all means get a pre-paid.
I saw one (Virgin brand?) at I think Wherehouse or one of those CD/DVD retailers. Not bad - about $40 for the phone and you bought phone cards (worked out to be about 25 cents per call) to go with the phone. Ideal for someone who really only wants it for emergencies or is travelling and wants one for the trip.
I have Cingular & would recommend avoiding them. Their customer service slogan is “Let me transfer you, sir” and they’ve shut off my phone for being 2 days late on a payment after prompt payments for 9 months. Not really an ideal situation. And their deals aren’t that good either. I got caught up when they bought AT&T. They claim to have a great network where you get reception everywhere (probably your most important need, being that I doubt you want to wait for reception after your water breaks) but I only get a signal 50% of time in my house…in San Francisco. I don’t know how it’d be in the Pink Bubble.
T-Mobile is my recommendation as well. Have heard far less horror stories.
But again, ask your neighbors about reception in your geographical area. Minutes, deals, and fancy phones should definately take a back seat to your primary necessity: having the phone work at the exact moment you might need it.
The choices of phone will depend on which company you choose. The one I got with Virgin is a Nokia Somethingorother, and I can’t remember how much it cost me at WallyWorld - definitely under $50, though. Works just great, excellent quality sound.
I have Tracfone & I am very happy with their service. I have not yet been in an area where I could not get coverage (Northern NJ, Metro NY). You can tell how much time you have & when that time expires just by looking at the phone. I used to have AT&T & I hated it (this predated Cingular & I’m not sure they still sell this prepaid plan). The one downside to Tracfone is that when you add time, you need to enter a crapload of numbers into your phone and it is tedious (You should always have enough time on the phone to deal with an emergency as you don’t want to do this when your water breaks).
I believe that other prepaid plans may be less expensive (e.g. T-Mobile) but the savings are contingent on your using a lot of minutes. It is far more important to have good coverage than to save a couple of bucks, so make sure anything you buy will work where you need it to.
You will need to buy a phone from Tracfone if you go this route. I like the Motorola V60. It is a reasonably small flip phone and is easy to operate.
I have Verizon prepay and it is pretty nice, but they have changed the program since bought mine, so I don’t know if it is still worth it. Not even sure what the current set up is, since I am still on the prior program.
I looked into Verizon prepay last summer when I was figuring out which prepaid plan I wanted to use. Their plan was only slightly less expensive than their standard plan, but limited you a great deal more in all sorts of ridiculous ways.
Nowadays, they clearly want you to lock yourself into one of their standard one or two year plans.
Yeah, the plan I am on is $15 a month, 10 cents a minute for calls. It includes their Get It Now program, 5 cents per text message, and the unused money rolls over as long as I pay the $15. Since I don’t use it much, I am pretty happy with it.