Paul, Just in case, - consider buying a cheap unlocked GSM cell phone with the right frequencies from e-Bay, and a separate prepaid (and refillable) sim card - also from eBay. This way you will be left with a cheap and potentially usable cell phone. (I am not sure if prepaid cell phones that you buy in Walmart etc can be easily unlocked or not).
Very often you can buy some promotional sim-cards on eBay at half the price of what the minutes are worth otherwise. Couple years ago I bought couple of sim cards for Tuyo (it's an IDT-owned cell phone company using T-mobile's network). If you are within populated area, T-mobile's network works just fine. Recharging with Tuyo was just fine (online or over the phone), but outside of recharing their customer service sucks. Also, their balance if not renewed expires one day earlier that they claim. (but what do you care?) http://www.tuyo.com (they seem to have coverage in HI as well.) Also, it has good rates for international calls to many countries from the US. HTH, Igor On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 11:44 PM, Paul Ewins<paulewins at optusnet.com.au> wrote: > Hi all, > my girlfriend and I are heading off at the end of the month on a six > week trip to Hawaii, New York, Montreal and the south-east of Canada. Rather > than use global roaming and risk large charges from our local (Australian) > carrier what we have done in the past is buy a cheap phone or a SIM card > when we get to our destination and use a pre-paid account. > > It looks like my antique Nokia is incompatible with US frequencies anyway, > so the plan is to pop into Walmart and get a cheap pre-paid phone there. Is > it safe to assume that any carrier with coverage in Hawaii will have > coverage in New York? Once we get to Montreal I assume that we will have > to get a new SIM card, and possibly a new phone if the Walmart one is locked > to the carrier. Or is their a carrier that makes swapping from the US to > Canada easy? > > If you have any recommendations or a better plan I'd love to hear it. > > Paul Ewins > Melbourne, Australia > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
