Mobile phone for america visit

[Heckler]

just got back from orlando, 2 good weeks, sun shone, binlids happy, ive had my fix of dogs bollox roller coasters, nice and brown etc. any way first day go shopping to get the essentials and ease in to the life style, swmbo said how about a couple of those cheap radios so that binlids could do their bit in the parks and we could meet up with them as and when, only trouble with them is of course that they are a bit like channel 16 in egypt (another story!). went to radio shack and spotted that Cingular (AT&T) were doing a deal on mobile phones, $20 each with $10 FREE airtime, sounded good but got even better, Cingular as part of the deal allow free calls between Cingular phones, only draw back they take a dollar a day if you use the phone.
So to sum up, the phones cost me in effect $10 each, we made as many calls as we wanted to each other at no charge and have come home with $3 of credit on each phone.
Even better i could drop swmbo and binlids off shopping and go mooching doing boys things like flying helicopters at kissimmee and then when they were ready they would call me to pick them up and i had escaped "shopping"

 

[Robin]

We got back from the USA just a few hours ago too and we take the same route to robbing the homegrown cellphone networks as you. Our 02 contract phones in the UK are replaced annually if we wish and are always supplied 'unlocked' ie can be used on any network with the appropriate SIM card, so we keep the previous year's ones for use with PAYG SIMs when in the USA. We buy PAYG SIMs for thes No2 phones from Cingular on arrival in the USA and if we do this at one of their many stores they don't charge for the SIM itself just for the airtime minutes which come in lots of $15/$25/$100 and calls cost just 10 cents/minute BUT incoming are also charged as well as outgoing. We use the the tarif with $1/day the phone is used to make or receive a call at 10 cents/minute in/out because as you say this one allows all calls to other Cingular phones completely free and my yankee born SWMBO has several friends and family members all on it, so she can talk all day for free to them and even to me! She tried very hard to use up the remaining minutes on my phone last night before we left for home but still failed and there was $8 worth left, unfortunately lost unless the card is used/topped up within 3 months! The only minor drawback is that unless the PAYG SIM is used and topped up, unused minutes are lost as too is the telephone number after varying periods (3 months with a $25 card, but 12 months with a $100 one) so, buying $25 cards we have different phone numbers every trip. I put our UK cellphones on divert all to voicemail with text messaging to notify of any voice messages left so no need to keep calling them to check the mailboxes, I reckon we save huge amounts that way over roaming with these at rip-off UK rates.