Never used one of those sims before. But I did buy an American Mobile from Walmart. It was a very cheap motorola for $20. It came with $10 credit too. It was on Cingular Wireless.

What I did was to use the American Mobile to text back home and to use my UK mobile to receive texts.

Reason being is the US mobiles charge you 5c to receive texts.

It was 10c to text internationally and 5c to text locally.

Also US mobile phones charge you for receiving calls.

Hope some this helps.

Regarding the previous post, note that she is referring to pay-as-you-go phones. It is not entirely correct to say that US cell phones charge you for incoming calls. This depends on the carrier and the plan. Pay-as-you-go phones typically DO charge for incoming calls, but most regular plans do not. Obviously, I appreicate that a visitor to the US is not going to buy a cell phone contract (nor would they able to do, not being a US resident)!

Cingular is gradually being rebranded as AT&T. They are reasonable... I use them but I would say Verizon have the best coverage (but not the best customer service).

Also, the cost of receiving/sending text messages may vary from carrier to carrier and plan to plan.

I should also mention that the cost of making calls varies too, depending on the location you are calling and (again) the cell phone plan. Of course, with a contract you typically get X minutes per month anyway so there is no additional charge for making a call. And almost all carriers offer free mobile-to-mobile calls when calling another phone on the same network. However, I'm not sure about pay-as-you-go phones. For example, if you bought a Cingular one and called my Cingular phone, I don't know if you would be charged. I suspect you would be, though. Also, I don't know if I would be charged if I called you... I get free mobile-to-mobile calls within the Cingular network but that may not be applicable when the phone I am calling is pay-as-you-go.

To summarize, I think I have posed more questions than I have answered!

Thanks guys

I've seen phones on the Walmart site for$15 - there is nothing about there being any credit on the SIM. I reckon we'd need 3 phones (or SIMs) and, if the ebay route works, I'd get 3 sims each with $30 credit for a little over £20. I've found one guy on ebay offering 2 activated SIMs delivered for $22. This is mighty tempting, I must say.

Hey what happened to one of the words in my post above? It's been replaced by "spam", but all I did was name the cell phone carrier! I named another carrier in the same post but that wasn't censored. What a bizarre policy, especially since I fail to see how "V e r i z o n" (spaces inserted to prevent more censorship) could possibly be interpreted as spam.

It is not a bizarre policy. We were getting spammed by companies selling mobile phones so some of the words, such as N okia, were put into the swear filter to thwart them.

luci

How does that thwart them? All it does it replace certain words with "spam"... it wouldn't stop them from posting the messages. And it IS a little bizarre... I understand the reasoning behind it but it's to the detriment of HT members, and making the site user-friendly should always come first.

Sorry GEB but I really don't think it's bizarre or that it's to the detriment of HT members, it's not as if they're words used on a daily basis on the forum.

It may not prevent the messages being posted but it does prevent others seeing the product they're spamming.

Obviously if you feel that strongly about it you may PM a member of admin to discuss the matter further.

Pippy

Hi,

The mods were correct in what they were saying regarding spam. In an effort to make it futile for these mobile phone spammers we added the terms to the swear filter.

However, since doing so the amount of spam for these services has reduced.

We have therefore removed the terms for the time being. If, in the future the problem reoccurs we will readd them but for the time being they are removed from the filter.

HTH

Van