which prepaid cell phone is best?

Question

I have only a cell phone- no land line at the house. My mom has no cell phone and is coming for a visit. I would like to have a phone she can use while she's here in case of emergencies. Which prepaid plan is most cost effective with a VERY easy to operate phone? She's not big on gadgets, so no cameras, no special ring tones, etc...Do these phones come with chargers? Do you pay only for minutes or for so many months as well? Thanks!

Answer 1

I like tmobile. They have a great phone with no extra's a samsung. They do come with chargers. With tmobile prepaid there is NO daily use fee. After a certain amount of minutes have been bought the price drops to 10 cents a minute it starts off higher.

The minutes you buy are good for a year, you can add to it at any time on the phone, online, or by buying a refill at places like target.
Outgoing text is 10 cents incoming is 5 cents. And if your getting close to the expiration of one year with still minutes you can buy as little as $10 in minutes and it will roll all the minutes over for another year.

We bought one for our teenage son, he loves it. The nice thing was I used his this summer when I went out of state to stay with my mom in hospice. Everyone friends, family, etc. Wanted to stay in touch daily. So, the regular cell bill would have been HUGE. The great thing was everyone knew I was using his prepaid and felt they could call as often as possible to check, they asked me if they could help with the bill. So we were able to break down the entire time who, how many minutes etc, at 10 cents a minute.

We looked at a lot when we chose our son's plan. Most have a $1 fee for the days you use it. I didn't want to have to pay a $1 for every day he called to tell me to come pick him up for football practice on top of the minutes. We give him an 'allowance' of $20 a month. If he uses close to that it warns him and he has to give us some of his $ he earns working in our contracting business with his father.

Answer 2

Hi!
I work at Radioshack and like 90 % of our cell phone customers are pre-paid. If you live on the east side of the US, alot of the phones will have coverage, some of them borrow other cell phone company's towers. As for the best and easiest, I would recommend the Cingular Go-Phone.

Heres some info about the diff. companies...

Cingular- They have the most towers out of all the cell phone companies, period. They have about 45,000 towers, whereas Sprint and Verizon have only 22,000. They are completely digital, and all of their minutes are rollover minutes, with other companies, you may not have that. You can buy a 50 dollar go-phone card and the phone will not need new minutes for 6 months. As far as ease to put the minutes on there all you have to do is dial * 888 ( don't hit send) then the pin number, # send wireless number. Then its there, automatically! With other phones like Virgin Mobile and Tracfone you have to wait for the transaction to go through. In Cingular its automatic.
Phones, C139 is 19.99 right now, and has a color screen, no flip top.
Nokia 01500 is also 19.99 really easy to uses.

Virgin Mobile- They are the only pre-paid company that has their phones night and weekend minutes, even if you just pay minute by minute, and if you buy a plan for 44.99 you don't have to worry about minutes, because its 400 anytime minutes, and then unlimted night and weekends, which starts on friday at 7 pm, and ends monday at 7 am, and starts every weeknight at 7.
Their phones are predominately made by Kyocera, and some of their screens are hard to read. Such as the Oyster,Snapper, and the Slice.
Tracfone- They are the first company to have a pre-paid wireless, and each minute is approximately 12.8 cents per minute, the pin number is really hard to put in, and every time that I have called them for a customer (customer service) all the people I have talked to could barely speak english and they were rude. They have mostly Motorola and Nokia phones, which are easy to use. The minutes take about 35 minutes to appear.They still run on analog towers, and most of their phone are still cellular.

T-Mobile- probably the best rates for price, and ease, but if you don't put a pin in right when you need it the phone stops working. They have HORRIBLE customer service, and some of the represenitives in my area are snotty. other than having good prices on minutes, I wouldn't recommend them.

Hope it helps, good luck!

Answer 3

I have to disagree with Princess. I have a Tracphone and it works great for my purposes. I rarely use my phone and in most cases I never go over the minutes on their $20 cards with an hour of airtime and 3 months of service. This means I wind up paying about $8 per month for my cell phone! As for your uncle, if it says it comes with $40 of free airtime then that's what he gets. When he uses up the airtime he will need to purchase more.

Answer 4

I don't recommend Virgin Mobile. When we decided to no longer use the phone, they drove us CRAZY with, "don't forget to recharge your minutes" recorded calls for months! I'm unfortunately not familiar with other prepaid cell phones.

Answer 5

I would say Tmobile.Tmobile has prepaid services,which I was user of for about 4 years.There minutes are 60 Minutes for $10.00 and so on.You can look on http://www.Tmobile.com and it has pictures and 3D views of the phones.

Answer 6

I personally like trac phone all walmarts have them and
they are simple They have chargers, and they cost 10 cents
a minute to use to anywhere USA.. Check your area for coverage though..

Answer 7

for india - tata indicom, or bsnl for tariffs, the former for sets as well ,which are pre programmed for usage and you can choose the one friendliest for your mum

Answer 8

i have a samsung phone which is awesome but i guess you could use a razor phone.