Re: Straight Talk Phone Plans
Pros? Cons? $30 vs the $45 plan? Straight talk wireless that is sold at Wal-mart. Not about bashing Wal mart. Just thinking about switching phone services. I don't currently have a smart phone so phone ideas that go with this plan would be good too?
Thanks in advance!
I'd be more than happy to help you with this.
I just switched from Verizon's 63 dollar a month plan for 450 min to landlines, unlimited mobile to mobile and unlimited text, but no data to Straight talk's 45 dollar a month plan unlimited everything. My mom has straight talk from a straight talk phone, on the 30 dollar plan. I did the SIM card thing with a smart phone on the 45 dollar a month plan.
First of all, I had to do a lot of studying on how to do it. I happened to buy an already-unlocked HTC Incredible 2, so it was nothing more than putting the straight talk sim card in it and following the instructions. But....had my phone NOT been unlocked it would have been much more involved. This is THE MOST DIFFICULT WAY to do it, but saved me a ton of money in the end. You absolutely do not have to go this route. You can simply purchase a straight talk phone and when you set it up, tell it you want to port in your old number, put in the old number, the user name and password from your old account and bam, within 15 minutes your straight talk phone will be your new phone.
Second, if you have a phone compatible with Verizon or AT&T you can probably use your existing phone without the need to buy one. One thing that is nice is you can definitely use your existing number, no need to change it. I ported over my Verizon number to my straight talk phone for a corporate jet hangar, and it worked so seamlessly someone called me about a flight a few minutes after it ported over to straight talk and they couldn't tell the difference.
Third, the phones straight talk sells with their plans seem to not have the best reviews. But if you have (I know you said you don't) an iphone that is jailbroken, it would work fine. Also, most droid phones work. Blackberry phones will not work. I don't know anything about their non-smart phones. You can usually buy an unlocked cell phone (meaning it will work on any service provider's network) on ebay pretty cheap. To not get too complicated, I bought 400 dollar HTC Droid Incredible 2 on ebay for 149. But it had a bad verizon ESN. That means the phone will not work on the Verizon network as the person who had the phone didn't pay their bill and Verizon turned off that phone on their network so nobody else could use it. However, it was unlocked so I just stuck the straight talk sim card in and wham, it started working just fine on the AT&T network. If you pay a little more, you can buy unlocked phones with totally clean ESN's on ebay and just get a straight talk SIM card and be on the air in minutes. This way you aren't limited by phones that straight talk sells.
If you want to blab your mouth off, get the 45 dollar a month plan. It's unlimited everything, although if you start downloading tons of stuff they will throttle you back. But if you don't have a smart phone, you won't use the data part anyway.
Straight talk uses either Verizon for their own phones, or AT&T for the SIM card phones. My phone is a verizon phone but it shows AT&T now on the display.
What are the pros? Well, 50.27 a month (total after all fees) is pretty good for unlimited talk, text and data. You can keep your existing number.
Cons? Well, straight talk is only 3G, so no 4G download speeds.
I hope this helped. I believe some of the data issues I'm having is straight talks data network is having some issues right now, but other than that, its fine. I can listen to music in my car streamed in to my phone for free, and unlimited.
