Everything easy to find, all essential functions can be found online
Written: Aug 13 '07
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Our two year cingular contract expired and we were finally free to find something else. We had more than 3000 unused rollover minutes, despite being on the plan with the least number of monthly minutes, so it was obvious that we would benefit from switching to prepaid. Besides the talking we occasionally use SMS, but that's about it, we never check email on our phones and have no desire to watch the weather forecast or "Jeopardy" on our cell phone. Plain old talking and texting is what we needed.
We narrowed down our choice to a couple of providers and settled with Virgin Mobile. Main reason is that their phones are dirt cheap, the minutes don't expire (provided you add some money each 90 days), for a bit more than 7$/month you get 10 cents all the time, and they use the Sprint network which has decent coverage in our area and, so I've been told, beyond. That's cool because roaming is free with VM.
Setting up the phone service online was a breeze. I had to call CS twice because one of our phones needed to import a number from Cingular, and that process was not entirely smooth, it took longer than expected. But if you start from scratch and don't mind getting a new phone number, it goes super easy.
If my phone slips out of my hands into the toilet or gets stolen, no worries, I'll just buy another 20$ phone and activate it online. If I want to change the "plan" I can do it online or from the phone, anytime I want. It is also easy to change payment methods and frequency, again, either through the website or via the phone.
Besides settings for phone setup, payment, and change of plan, everything else is pretty easy to find on the website. It is a bit weird though how they treat you like a teenager or young 20 something when you're trying to contact them by phone or when you browse through the site. The other "content" is also tailored for the young and young of heart. I cannot comment on the "content" since I never used it except for a soundbit by William Shattner which I use as the greeting for my voicemail.
For light users, such as me, or for medium users (for whom they offer prepaid "contracts", with very competitively priced included minutes), Virgin Mobile deserves strong consideration. Texting is pretty cheap, too, at 5c a pop, and it can become cheaper if you buy a bundle of text messages. A minus is the somewhat cheap phones, although they do their job and it won't cost you an arm and a leg to replace them. Our "Oysters" perform pretty well, are sufficiently small and light, and cost only 1999 a piece. Another minus is the sluggish data transfer which makes browsing (costs extra) or checking balance and surfing "Virgin Mobile XL content" a tad slow.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jierik
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Location: lost in the midwest
Reviews written: 41
Trusted by: 3 members
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