T-Mobile Review

I got the Nokia 1208 Cell Phone with T-Mobile's prepaid plan. You have 2 choices for prepaid plans: Pay By The Day (self explanatory), or Pay-As-You-Go which is the plan where you buy blocks of minutes. Neither require a credit check. You cannot buy just any phone and activate it for prepaid. You need to buy certain phones and for the most part they do not have all the bells and whistles of contract phones.

When you buy your minutes, they expire three months from purchase date, however, once you hit the $100 mark of minutes bought, you qualify for the "Gold Rewards" program where your minutes don't expire for a year, and with every refill you get 15% more minutes for free.

When you buy minutes, you must buy them in denominations of $10, $25, $50, or $100. You can't purchase a certain number of minutes or in denominations other than those listed. To refill minutes, you can make a free call from the phone or go online and refill there. Online is better. It's just like making any other online purchase. If I get stuck and have to refill by phone it's a production. You have to enter everything in the automated system, and then you get turned over to a customer service rep to verify mailing address and zip code and the last 4 of the card. When you first go online after purchasing, you create an account on "my T-mobile" which is where you can refill minutes, view other plans, upgrade, see what your balance is, add people to your phone's address book, etc. The my T-mobile website has been totally revamped recently. It is much easier to use and you can find answers easily now.

T-mobile prepaid cell phones come with what I call "the annoyance package." You get free news and sports text messages. Sometimes you get a lot of these and there is no way to stop them. If there's a lot of news going on or a big sports event like the Super Bowl going on, you can get MANY text messages. One day I got 18.

Prepaid cells are not only good if you have bad credit or don't want to sign a contract. If you are like me, living in an area that every other company considers roaming, or has spotty coverage, these are a real plus. Unlike contract phones, T-mobile prepaid cells do not need to use T-mobile towers exclusively. They have some kind of a contract with other carriers to use their towers, so you basically have coverage everywhere. When you look on the screen, it will say "t-mobile" or "AT&T" or whatever tower you are using. Obviously, paying by the minute incurs a higher per-minute cost than if you had a contract, but for me, I'd be roaming all the time so it works out.

You can send and receive texts too. I don't know how much they cost. I only text if it's necessary and I have only one bar of reception. It's probably expensive.

I do not use my cell phone much, which is another reason it works so well for me. I basically have it for emergencies and to back up Vonage. In the case of a power or internet outage, I have set my Vonage to automatically forward my calls to the cell.

I like T-mobile's prepaid service. My last prepaid was Cingular, which obviously was a while ago. Cingular had their phones set to become useless after a time, forcing you to buy a new one and the per-minute charge was quite high. The Nokia has a SIM Card that can be transferred to another phone. I think it's quite reasonable. The coverage is fine, with voice quality good some days, not so much on others.

I haven't had to use customer service other than to refill and ask if they could shut off the free texts. The wait was long, but customer service was helpful and friendly. Everything else I wanted to know I found on myT-mobile.com.

It is a quality prepaid phone service.