There is an ever growing number of prepaid wireless service providers in the United States. With all of these choices, it’s hard to choose the right company for you. The provider that works best for your friend, may not be the provider that works best for you.
When choosing a provider, it’s important to know exactly how you will use the phone on a day to day basis. Are you going to be texting a lot? Are you going to be making a lot of local or long distance calls? Do you need advanced features such as wireless internet/wifi or bluetooth? Is the phone going to be used only for emergencys?
- If the phone is for emergency’s, I would highly recommend Virgin Mobiles 18 cents a minute plan. After your initial top up, you will not need to add any more money to your phone (to keep the account active) for 3 whole months (90 days).
- If your looking for full feature phone, T-Mobile ToGo is the best choice.
- Planning on using a lot of minutes? Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile both have very generous offerings, as does Tracfone. T-mobile is a bit more expensive.
- Virgin Mobile now has a very generous text plan for those who plan to text more than place calls.
All the current providers seem to fill a specific niche. Boost Mobile targets those who want a hip network with Chirp and downloadable content. Virgin Mobile is the “day to day” phone as I call it. Helio is the techy geek network. T-Mobile is the I couldn’t get regular T-Mobile contract and I want a normal phone network. Tracfone is the I’m 80 years old and pay higher rates and use crap phones network 🙂
No matter what network you choose, make sure your decision is not solely based on their phone offerings. Look at who provides their actual network, what their rates are, are there hidden costs, etc etc.