...and we have a sponsor!

Yes, folks, look down and to your right. No longer is there the hulk of Google there for a bunch of sponsored links, but rather, a static banner touting a static sponsor, BabbleBug.com. Good company, that...I work for 'em a bit and we decided if they helped support this site, I'd support them right back with placement of that "buggy" banner right to the right on the pages of my site.

Even better, they actually have something to do with the actual content of this site, and they aren't some random link farm! They sell cell phones, cell phone airtime and other such goodies, to be exact. So check 'em out; they've got my seal of approval, both as a customer (which I am at times) and a person who works with them.

Happy March everyone!

Virgin Mobile pumps up the volume :)

Gone is the 18-cent-a-minute plan, as far as I can tell. Gone is Virgin-To-Virgin 10c calling. That tier of service is now 20 cents per minute :/ or $6.99 per month for 10 cents per minute. But they now have some darned-sweet plans if you talk a bit...

Their new "roll forward" plans expire every 30 days if you don't add airtime, or roll over if you do. Starting at a relatively expensive $20 per month, they're actually worth paying extra for if you talk a bit: $20 gets you 200 minutes, $30 gets you 400 and $50 gets you 1000 minutes. Roll-over minutes (AT&T, I don't have any money fo ryou to sue me for) can be up to 5000 in number (versus 12 months' worth on AT&T for what it's worth) and don't expier, so this is actually a pretty hot plan for relatievly heavy talkers. If I didn't browse and text with a smartphone, I could probably fit my usage into $30 per month on this plan...with sub-10-cent rates finally breaking in, things are looking good here. Just keep in mind there are no night and weekend minutes on these plans.

Their monthly plans are also a bit better. Gone is the $15 per month 100 minute plan (not really needed anyway, considering the plans surrounding that price point)...all plans now include night and weekend minutes of some sort. $25 per month buys 200 anytime and 500 night and weekend minutes, $35 gets 300 and 1000, $50 gets 400 and unlimited, $60 gets 600 and unlimited and $100 gets 1000 and unlimited. So basically, if you use an equal amount of weekday and night\weekend minutes per month, or use more than that amount during nights and weekends, the Virgin Mobile monthly plans beat out the anytime minute 30-day cards that are now available. Unlimited mobile-to-mobile (Virgin Mobile only as far as I can tell) is now available on the top two plans ($50 and $100) rather than on only the very highest-end one. They also look to have roll-over minutes...wonder if that's anytime-only or also includes the limited night and weekend allotments...

You also get cheaper messaging; $5 per month for 1000 of any type or $10 for unlimited. Best deal in prepaid...again.

now what I don't get is why Virgin Mobile compares themselves to Boost Mobile (remember, Sprint is merged with Nextel, which owns Boost...and Sprinthalf-owns Virgin Mobile) in a few places on the site. Okay, maybe they're trying to get people of the old iDEN network, but still, odd conduct if you ask me.

My theory on these improvemments: Sprint released a kick-butt unlimited plan today, for $100...that includes EVERYTHING :)

Boost Update

With a new logo and a new plan, Boost Mobile looks to be revitalizing their brand. No, they're not adding phones or making options cheaper, but take a look at their offerings again anyway...

First off, the i855 camera phone on iDEN is down to $79.99. I might be wrong, but this seems to be a recent development...and a good one at that. Not that the i855 is great phone, but it is the only Boost cameraphone now, and cheaper is better right?

Second, there's a "$1 chat" option that is basicaly what Verizon's INPulse service has been for a long time: unlimited mobile to mobile, unlimited nights starting at 9 p.m., 10 cent calling at other times. Walkie talkie still costs and extra $1 per day, but hey, more plans mean better plans, right?

As a final\side note, you can also now calculate the tax on Boost's Unlimited service. So they're no longer paying the taxes for you...but at least they appear to only be charging service taxes rather than heaping on extra fees...

Virgin Mobile, T-Mobile Phone Deals

Some more deals:

1. BestBuy has the LG Aloha for $10. Looks like it's the regular price, too.
2. T-Mobile's Nokia 2610, when bundles with a $100 ard, is a mere $88 at Target right now. I may have to pick one up!

Tracfone Deals

Thanks to Turk, there is some new Tracfone deal info.

1. The Kyocera K126 is now available as a twofer (pink) or free with a 120-minute card (regular).

2. The Motorola w370 is now available with Double Minutes for Life at Wal-Marts.

3. The LG 3280 is now $49.99 as well with Double Minutes For Life (like the w370).

4. Sam's, Wal-Mart and Dollar General all now have the LG 200c for around $20.

Oh and by the way: support this site, please click the sponsored links to your right!

Page Plus Unlimited Just Got Cheaper

In the wake of unlimited plans on the contract side, Page Plus Cellular has toned down the price of their unlimited plan somewhat as well; it is now $2.49 per day. That's about $75 per month, significantly less than what the contract carriers are asking for their plans, however you'd have to use on average 43.6 minutes per day to justify upgrading from the normal plan (with $80 cards) to unlimited. That's slightly over 1300 minutes per month. That's better than the 1570-ish number with the $2.99 daily fee, but before you plunk down for the unlimited calling afforded by the now-cheaper Page Plus plan make sure you actually talk that much.

DMFL Motorola w370 @ Tracfone

Yes folks looks like Tracfone is including Double Minutes For Life (aka DMFL) with more and more of their phones. The newest entrant into the DMFL fold is the Motorola w370. No extra charge for the phone, just the normal $49.99 when bought from Tracfone's website. Yay cheap minutes. Maybe it has something to do with AT&T's discontinuance of its older network technologies?

Unfortunately, the CVS $15 60-minute card deal turns out not to be so :(

Tracfone Sales

Looks like Tracfones are getting cheaper for the moment, and so are minutes...

First off, the Motorola v170 and LG 200c are both $20 at some stores.
Second, at CVS drugstores Tracfone's 60-minute cards are temporarily $15 apiece instead of $20, if you're looking for cheap service time.

For mroe info, see the Turk's post here (thanks!):

http://z7.invisionfree.com/Go4Prepaid/index.php?showtopic=22&st=120&#entry11082629

Phones on Sales at CellGuru

Hotliked in the title is the page. The Cell Guru (who does something similar to what I do here, except in a different way...and has been around longer than I have...and we're sorta friends) is selling off some of his older phones. I want dibs on the Super Slice he's selling off so I can review it, then give it away...it's $30 shipped FYI...but anyway here are the other deals (prices include basic shipping):

Used Nokia 3589i on Page Plus w\case - $25
Nokia Shorty 2116i on Virgin Mobile w\case - $15
Nokia 6101 on T-Mobile (water damage: external screen dead, internal scratched) - $10

Happy buying...these are all decent phones...and let the Cell GUru know who sent you, thanks!

Virgin Mobile Phones: The New and The Discounted

And now for the grand finale: Virgin Mobile. Smaller news first...

1. Target now has the regular (as opposed to the new red version) Kyocera Cyclops available for a mere $40. Online, it's here: http://snurl.com/1zbfm. To which I say "that's about what the phone is worth", despite the 1.3-megapixel camera and other advanced features found on it. My two beefs about the phone: build quality and battery life. But anyway, the Cyclops jst got 20% cheaper if you're buying from Target.

2. Don't know if I posted this before, but the LG Aloha is now $15 on Virgn Mobile's website, $5 less than the Kyocera Marbl if you buy the latter online, right in line with the Marbl if you get the marbl from Wal-Mart.

In slightly bigger news, Virgin Mobile is back up to three "free" phones: the Kyocera K10 Royale with $9.99 in airtime, the Oystr with $19.99 worth, and the Audiovox 8610 for $24.99 worth. I'd take the Vox over the Kyoceras any day of the week, though none o the "free" phones are spectacular, as is to be expected.

Arguably the biggest news is the (finally) discontinuation of the Kyocera Switch_Back and a $10 drop in price for the Kyocra Wild Card, down to $89.99. However, you no longer get a second month of unlimited text messaging free when you pay for the first month.

Last, but not least...

3. Virgin Mobile now presents the Flare, by LG! AKA the LX165 (or VML165), this little phone was first seen by me as a rather anonymous member of a merchant pricing sheet for various Virgin Mobile phones. At that point the retail price, which often exceeds the price Virgin Mobile charges on its own website for its phones, was $49.99. This phone could certainly be worth that much, but you don't have to pay that much for it. The price: a mere $30.

What's so great about the Flare? First off, it's about the highest-end non-camera-phone out there right now, aside from some Blackberries and PDAs. This isn't saying much, but having dual color displays (something the LX160 on Sprint, which was recently phased out from their website, lacks), Bluetooth capability, Speakerphone, voice dialing and of course web access makes this phone a sweet deal for someone who doesn't need, or want, to take pictures with their cell phone. I would also argue that, despite the low price, that this little beauty is the best-looking Virgin Mobile phone to date, to the point that, style-wise, I'd put this phone on equal footing with the Motorola Razr, w375 (which is good-looking in its own right) or even the Blackberry Pearl. I think I'm gonna have to pick both this phone and the LG Aloha up in the near future. This one is just soooo cool, in contrast to the rather juvenile Cyclops, the outlandish Switch_Back, or even the more subdued WildCard (which in my opinion looks better than the generic M1000 Lingo, which in turn looks etter than the Switch_Back\Strobe that preceeded it).

Want a link to this little wonder? Here it is:

http://www.virginmobileusa.com/phones/phoneDetail.do?skuId=VML165

With that, the prepaid news ticker here at Go4Prepaid is up to date. Thanks for reading and if you want to go to one of these carrier sites, check to your right to see whether Google has, through thir magical algorithms, placed an appropriate link in the sponsored links section of this site. Every little click helps!

Net10 Drops Phone Prices

Thought some Net10 phones cost too much in the past? I'm sure we all agree that yes, there was a distinct price premium of Net10 over Tracfone. That premium has now been mostly erased, courtesy a two-phone price drop. Oh, and did I mention that Net10's phone selection is of better quantity and quality than Tracfones? Well, that too...

The price reduction impacts the Motorola w370 flip and the Motorola w375 camera phone. They are now $49.99 and $59.99, respectively. The LG phone prices haven't moved; the 1500 is still $59.99 and the CG225 (as opposed to the CDMA PM225) is still $89.99. But it sure is nice to see Net10's well-built Motorola-by-Compal phones come down to a reasonable price. the w375 would be in my shopping cart right now, but I don't want Tracfone blacklisting another zipcode on my account.

Though they might have killed this code already; when I was dealing in Tracfones the person I sold\shipped phones to was here in town.

Anyway, Net10's phone deals just got a good bit better with that $20-per-phone-on-two-phones price drop. You might want to have a look, even if they're using America's Most Loaded Network (well, what else would more bars in more places entail? It would also explain the garbled calls that also plague this network).

Verizon Wireless SLashes Prepaid Roaming Costs

For those few who talk enough, or have enough absolutely disposable income, to be on Verizon's INPulse prepaid wireless program, roaming just got a LOT cheaper.It is down from 69 cents per minute to a quite-low 20 cents per minute, less than what you'd get on Page Plus Celluler even if you got an $80 card at a slight discount.

Hopefully what this means is that, for customers off of Verizon's own INPulse plans, roaming rates will likewise decrease, or carriers like Tracfone will be more amicable to working with Verizon. The running theory is that Tracfone has lousy CDMA phones because they don't get a good deal from Verizon on the minutes that those phones use, whereas AT&T gives them a good deal, leading to decently feature-rich phones. If this is the case, and Verion passes these savings along to Tracfone, maybe this means we'll start getting halfway-decent Tracfones into stores and onto Tracfone's website again. A man can dream...

Also, hopefully this means lower roaming prices for Page Plus Cellular customers. If Page Plus dropped roaming to even 30 or 40 cents per minute (in their "fake money" system) that would be enough to make Page Plus Cellular a perfectly reliable, erfectly economical service to use no matter where you might roam, so you only have to carry one prepaid phone even if you travel. If Page Plus comes out with cheaper roaming, I might just grab an INPulse phone, PagePlus-ify it, and keep it around for those times where neither my digital-only HTC Mogul on Sprint, nor my T-Mobile-To-Go-powered iPhone will get a signal. Speaking of the iPhone, there is now a 16GB version, for $100 more. Also, all iPhones can now be unlocked for free so long as you know what you're doing. See hackthatphone for more info there.

News Flash: GoPhone Deals

The boys at AT&T weren't going to be in this rather long news break, but it looks like they've cranked things up a notch as well. Their prepaid phone selection must now be the largest in the industry. The phones also range higher into the feature-set range than other prepaid carriers' offerings just yet. In all, they have 34 phone choices, spread over 19 phone models, if my counting is right, though this will change by the day as refrished phones are sold off and new phones come in. Here are some highlights:

Nokia 2610 refurb - $10
Samsung a117 refurb - $20
Samsung a437 refurb (camera phone) - $20
Sony Ericsson z310 a refurb (camera phone) - $30
Motorola Razr - $130
Motorola v365 - $140
ßony Walkman 2580i - $180
Nokia 6555 - $175
Nokia N75 - $270
Palm Treo 750 refurb - $270

You saw correctly. The last four phones are high-end beasts on prepaid, courtesy GoPhone's now-available unlimited data plan at $20 per month, last time I checked. These big boys (the the Nokia N75 is pretty darn big) have 3G data connectivity, where you can find it on AT&T's woefully underdeveloped HSDPA network, and yes, AT&T will give you a prepaid PDA phone. Please keep it there, AT&T, so other carriers can take the hint. The phone is cheap, too. I'm betting it can be unlocked relatively easily, as an added bonus. I'd even daresay it beats out the iPhone in certain applications (like those which require a keyboard) at a much lower price, but who cares about that comparison anyway? The iPhone is a name brand, while the Treo...isn't.

Wow, that was some cool GoPhone news, though their voice rates are still astronomical compared with pretty much everyone else's. I thought you're supposed to sell voice cheap and make money off of other features, like text messaging for example...wait...AT&T is already doing the texting thing...

T-Mobile News Bits

In brief, there are some phone deals available on T-Mobile you might not want to pass up.

As to the main selection, the Nokia 2610 is still $30, the Motorola v195 still $40, the Samsung t219 is still $50 and the Samsung Stripe still $90. But right now these phones are all coming with $25 refills...which is a reasonably sweet deal when you think about it, especially if you like the cheap bar-phone-ness that is the Nokia 2610. You effectively get it for $5.

But wait, there's more. Not included are two other phones, one on the low end, one on the high end. They hae promotions of their own. The low end phone is the Nokia 6030, which is a decent unit and is selling rght now for a mere $20. The high end? The gunmetal-grey Razr, for a mere $100. Yes, I know that the Razr has been out for what seems to be forever, but $100 for it is still a nice deal.

Tracfone Mayhem! New website, new cards, new promos, new loopholes and new phone numbers!

Wow...there's so much news I'm going to have to break it into several posts.

1, Check out the Tracfone Promo Codes link to your right. Lots of good promotional codes there, along with notes on which ones are active and which aren't. Generally a good resource for getting the most out of your Tracfone. Thanks Turk for keeping this database-in-a-post up!

2. Tracfone now has a new website. Things are, in my opinion, harder to navigate, but it is more task-oriented, guiding customers through either buying a phone or adding airtime to it, answering questions that they might have along the way. Fair enough.

3. Traqcfone now has, online, a 450-minute airtime card. Seems like they can't leave the $79.99 price point alone for too long. This means that, even with sales tax, you'll still come in under 20 cents per minute when you buy the card, no matter what phone you have, and under 10 cents per minute if you have double minutes on your phone. So yes, it is the best Tracfone deal yet outright, without having to fool with Twofer deals, which by the way haven't changed very recently to my knowledge. Hopefully these cards will become available at other online retailers so you can get them without tax, lowering the per-minute Tracfone price minimum to just under 17.8 cents per minute, or a little under 8.9 cents per minute with double minute. Text at that point is a cool 2.7-ish cents per message, always a plus.

4. Speaking of twofers, if you're a smart little bugger and want to try your luck, and eventually plug the hole that makes this possible (remember that a person who blacklisted his whole zipcode from Tracfone is speaking here...I think it's still blacklisted from online purchases), you can actually buy a twofer deal online with the pink Motorola c139s. Looks like they're new right now. Then go to your nearest GSM-Tracfone Wal-Mart and return the little guys. You'll get $15 back, as a Wal-Mart gift card, for each one. Or maybe $12.88. But regardless, you'll end up with two 60-minute cards costing you, in net, around $6 when you include tax. If you put them on a double-minute phone with a promo code or two, sub-25-cent-per-minute, sub-penny-per-text rates are very possible, turning your Tracfone into a contract-class wonder. Until the loophole is closed, that is. Enjoy while you can.

5. Last but not least, if you're switching from an old phone to a new phone, it may be easier for Tracfone to just give you 200 minutes of airtime than to endure the system strain that is required to get your phone number moved from one phone to another. That's saying something about Tracfone's system (sort of the same thing that losing my dad's phone number in a ort from Tracfone to Net10 said) but hey, if you're wanting a new phone, this may well be an option for you. Just go to Activate\Reactivate on Tracfone's website and ask to transfer your airtime from another phone.

That's all the Tracfone news, and in my opinion every piece is darned awesome. But there's still more news to go, from Net10, Verizon, Virgin Mobile and T-Mobile. All of which is pretty cool.

Twofers Are Back!

I'll make this quick, as I value my sleep. But Tracfone's "twofer" deas are now back. They're only available in GSM areas and the phone available with the deal is a pink (Valentine's Day) Motorola c139, but hey, $19.99 plus tax (shipping is free) for two 60-minute Tracfone airtime cards, plus a Motorola c139 phone, is a decent deal just for the airtime, as the cards alone are worth $30 minute-wise, $40 expiration-wise if you calculate everything up). Plus, you gotta do something with all those pink c139s sitting around from a few months ago. Certainly not sell them at Wal-Mart...you can get one iwth double minutes included for $15 including tax.

My advice? If you want a c139, grab a double-minute one from WalMart. Then grab a twofer from Tracfone, apply the 240+ minutes to your Wally World c139, give the pink c139 to your uncle, aunt, second cousin, son, daughter or dog and walk away happy that you got a good deal on Tracfone service.