Before I got the Razr in May (great time - it's was a Mother's Day special, I was due a new phone, got it free except for a $30 data transfer fee, plus they grandfathered in my old data plan of $20/mo) ... I looked into getting a pre-paid.
Runnin' Buddy and I had been looking at them for several months . She had a Blackberry and I had a Treo. We each found phones that would work for us (different phones) at Sprint and one at AT&T.
She went with the AT&T one that was most similar to her Blackberry and switched back at Christmas time. She has since had to change her pre -pay plan twice. And she told me the other day, she's going to have to do something different. She doesn't get text messages in the order they are coming in....said she will send a message and the reply comes back like it's in a different time zone, because it puts a time on it of an hour earlier, so it goes into her messages at that earlier time stamp. Example...she texted me Saturday night, that she would come pick me up to go have a "Big Lots" experience if I wanted to go while guys were watching football game. Texted her back about 5 minutes later to come get me. Hour later I called her to find out where she was (she lives 10 minutes away) and she was still at home. Never got the message. Looked in her phone and it was tucked back in the prior hour's messages. She's having problems getting calls too. Sunday she called and said she's going looking for a new phone and going on a plan, cause she's spending almost as much as what her plan was with Verizon, and she wasn't missing calls and messages with them!
After checking service availability with pre-paids, I ended up staying with a "plan" but Verizon was able to rework mine, and reduced it $50 a month from prior plan when I switched to the Razr. I have to be able to call Sandy, Utah, with no glitches at any time, for work. I found out that pre-paid phones do not have the same coverage as plan phones. I have no idea why, cause the towers are there so what difference does it make? I checked Verizon, Sprint, Virgin Mobile (from Walmart), At&T and US Cellular and I could not get a guarantee of service with anyone of them! Verizon came closest, but couldn't guarantee. If you only call east or west coast numbers, they are all pretty good, but go out into the midwest and mountain areas, it gets really scattered between the different companies.
Regardless of which type of phone or plan available, I think they are all a racquet.
Kind of like cable companies, but at least when we switched to Knology, we got such a great rate, it offsets staying with the cell phone plans.
