Cingular Prepaid Phones

GoPhone

The Cingular prepaid cell phone service is called "GoPhone". (Note Cingular is now called "Wireless from AT&T", but the prepaid service has the same name.)

Coverage

The company is partly owned by BellSouth, so their prepaid coverage is especially good in the southeastern half of the United States. Overall, coverage is good in the eastern half of the U.S. and on the west coast. Coverage gets spotty in most of the western half of the U.S. which is not uncommon for a lot of carriers.

Rates and Plans

There are two kinds of Go Phone plans: "Pay As You Go", and "Pick Your Plan", but only the "Pay As You Go" plan is like a prepaid plan. The "Pick Your Plan" is really a standard monthly cell phone plan but without a 2 year contract and no rebate on the phone purchase.

Pay As You Go -- Simple Plan

Calls cost 25 cents per minute. Text messages cost 5 cents to receive and send. International text messages cost 20 cents to send and 5 cents to receive.

Refill cards are available in denominations of:

$15 (expires in 30 days)
$25, $50 or $75 (expires in 90 days), and
$100 (expires in 365 days).

Under this plan $100 gets you 400 minutes for the entire year. A pretty good deal.

Pay as You Go -- Unlimited Mobile Plan

Calls cost 10 cents a minute. Calls to other Cingular mobiles are free. There is a access charge of $1.00 on the days that you use your phone. This is at least better than some companies which charge a daily access fee whether or not you use the phone. Still, if you talk every day, then you have to add about $365 to your yearly costs.

You use the same airtime refill cards as for the Simple Plan.

Depending on whether you know how long you will keep your prepaid phone service and how many minutes you tend to use or just in terms of convenience, it's slightly cheaper and more convenient to purchase the $100 airtime cards with a one-year period.

Phones

While it's tough to keep up with all the different models coming out, I know there are some reasonable phones available online such as inexpensive Motorola or Nokia flip phones.

There is also a pretty good selection of camera phones ranging from the basic to full-featured.

For example, Cingular has a small prepaid camera phone available in my area (Chapel Hill, NC) that is also a flip phone for $69, pretty good.

They also have phones with an FM radio if that's your style.

Standard Features

Basic Voice Mail, Caller ID, Call Forwarding, Three-Way Calling, Call Waiting, Nationwide Long Distance, and International Calling. (The international rates are not bad.)

Cingular Customer Service

From personal experience, while the staff are helpful, the wait is usually long at a retail location. While it's great that there's high demand, you may be better off ordering online.

Thanks for reading this GoPhone review. If you're thinking of getting one, you can check out the . . .

Latest GoPhone Bargains

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