Tracfone is a good deal but Alltel had what I really wanted...

by Dedra Kaye DeHart
(Clay City, IL USA )

I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere Illinois and we have limited cell phone services even with the big name companies. I waited and waited for Tracfone to get their butts in gear and make a camera phone compatible for this area but alas, they still haven't done it. So I found a prepaid flip camera phone at Walmart that was EXACTLY like the one my girlfriend got from Alltel under a monthly plan and I take great pics with it. In fact most of the reason I even have that phone is to take pics and then text them to my email. I rarely actually make phone calls on it, but if I need to it's ready to go. I buy a $20.00 card every two months to meet the minimum activation and I generally don't run out of minutes so you can tell my phone is not a 'necessity' for me but a luxury. Now they have a 'blackberryesque' prepaid with the qwerty keyboard and a camera that I'm just itching to buy but if I think about it, I don't know if I really need it because I hate texting people and don't receive text messages unless it's an official message from the Alltel U people. I might still buy it. Walmart is currently offering that here for $90.00 and the phone is mine. I don't have to keep up a contract, if I don't want to buy anymore minutes I'm just out a phone number and not a ton of money...

I had a Nokia camera phone from the local cell company years ago that was always dropping the calls and losing signal strength even when under a cell tower and would spend $40.00 a month on a phone that rarely worked. I ended up dropping the deal before the contract expired and paying a hefty penalty--$500.00 but I had figured that if I continued paying the monthly fee for 2 years I'd actually save money by deleting it. I am now wiser for that fiasco. I didn't use the phone enough to warrant spending that kind of money on it. I have to have a landline to keep my DSL--once again we're just now getting DSL and wireless Internet here in the middle of nowhere and that bill is around $50.00 a month just to have the privilege of a phone.

All in all, I like Tracfone because they had some special deals for online people that Alltel doesn't offer--like the double minutes plan which was perfect for me a month--but Alltel offered the phones that Tracfone couldn't deliver here so I went with the service I really wanted versus the minutes I may or may not use a month.

Thanks you for your time in making up this website...