Can I get a suggestion for a prepaid plan and phone for a parent?

[jerrykur]

Suggestion for prepaid plan and phone for parent

Hi,

My wife and her mother are meeting on the East Coast. We want to send my wife's mother a phone so she can have it to either tell my wife were she is at the airport or leave a text for my wife. My mother in law would also use it if they split up during the trip. My mother in law is not tech savvy, so I need something she can easily text with (no flip phones with T9), make calls, and snap some pictures. She has a facebook account, so she would probably use that app.

We also want to get a plan that she can use as needed. Nothing fancy, just a little data for facebook and some text and voice. Probably pre-paid would be best because I suspect she will only use the phone every few months.

Any suggestions for phone and plan?

 

[Rukbat]

Re: Suggestion for prepaid plan and phone for parent

A Prepaid plan usually has to be kept current every month or it lapses and you lose the number. I'd suggest setting up a Google Voice number for her. Straight Talk or Net10 (same parent company) is probably the best bet - it's easy to buy a one month card and activate it when she needs the phone, use it, then forget it (except for keeping the battery charged, so I'd get a phone she can remove the battery from for storage - it should hold for about 6 months out of the phone before needing a recharge) until the next time she needs to use it. Each time she activates an account, just change the number her Google Voice account forwards to to the new account's number. People calling her on her Google Voice number will be calling her cellphone. (She can even have it forward to her house phone at the same time, so if she's home and someone calls her on that number she can answer the call on her home phone - I do it that way.)

She'll get unlimited (virtually - they'd from on a 3 hour long phone call) talk and text and 5GB of data per month for under $50, and she can use her home wifi, if she has a wifi router, for data when she's home and not use any of that 5GB.

For simplicity and price, I'd go with something like a Samsung S3 or S3 Mini. They've been around for a while, and there are no major problems with them. (And even with no SD card installed, she can keep a lot of pictures and music on the phone if she wants to. [And if you have kids, she wants to keep pictures with her.] And SD cards are pretty cheap - a 32GB SanDisk card [I'll only buy SanDisk - I have some of their cards that are from the last century, and they still have the data I put on them back then] is only about $12 - and it can hold about 3,200 pictures.)

She can use Facebook, but for meeting up, at the airport or after, I'd say texting is the way to go. It's fast, easy and the person receiving the text know she received a text but doesn't have to look at it immediately. My wife and daughter (and I, when I need to) use tons of text a month to coordinate things, and just to say "how's your day going?"

The first thing she has to do is talk to people where she lives and find out which carrier has the best coverage where she'll need coverage. (For example, Sprint covers this town like a blanket - but my daughter's house is a total dead spot, so it's useless to me). Straight Talk and Net 10 use all 4 carriers, so whichever one she decides to use, it's the same plan and the same price, she just needs a different SIM card (if it's AT&T or TMobile with an S3 or S3Mini) and phone. Walmart has S3 Minis for about $140 new so even if you need a phone this week it's no problem.