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We know that Congress is aiming to put restrictions on prepaid phones. But how exactly will they do that? On the one hand, yes, you want to be able to have some idea of who is purchasing these phones. As has been noted by many, prepaid phones are widely used in drug deals. But to restrict the purchase of prepaid phones too much is to weaken the industry. It appears now that some states are looking to require photo ID when purchasing a prepaid phone.

Posted in Prepaid Phones on May 13th, 2008
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Yesterday, Forbes took a look at low-cost cellphones. So I thought it would be nice to share with the folks at Prepaid Reviews. But then I got to thinking about a theme I was hearing earlier in the month during seminars at CTIA. Carrier-subsidized phones is really a U.S. thing. Many experts and insiders expect this trend to fade away. So without subsidies, customers will have to think about exactly what it is they want and need in a phone. And it could become an all or nothing decision.

Posted in Prepaid Phones on April 24th, 2008
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I actually saw this story earlier this week, but left it alone. Why? Because while it sounds nifty that Alcatel is launching their first phone in the U.S., I was a bit confused. See, they said it was going to launch on O2. When I think O2, I think the British carrier. Alas, My confusion has been corrected. It appears that they’re talking about O2, as in Locus O2, one of our featured pay as you go phone providers. So all the sudden, this is exciting news.

Posted in Prepaid Phones on April 23rd, 2008
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Here’s something I missed at CTIA: American gadget maker Hop-on was showing a disposable GSM phone. To save on costs, the model doesn’t have an LCD screen. It seems like a gimmicky enough idea, at least gimmicky enough for a distributor to put in an order for a 10,000-phone test run. However, don’t expect the $20 phone to be in America anytime soon.

Posted in Prepaid Phones on April 14th, 2008
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If you had to guess, where would you think a convenience store in Texas would make more money: At the gas pumps, or inside the store? With the cost of fuel nowadays, it might be intuitive to answer “inside the store.” According to Mary Sullivan, owner of San Angelo, Texas-based Town & Country, that’s not the case. She claims that in the year ending December 30, 2007, they made $52 million more in gross profits form in-store merchandise than at the pumps. “Sullivan says lottery tickets and pre-paid phone cards for pay-as-you-go cell phones have been big growth categories.”

Posted in Prepaid Phones on April 11th, 2008
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Ever since I wrote about Jitterbug and their outrageous 50-cents-per-minute rate, I’ve been hoping that an alternative phone would come out for senior callers. Yeah, Verizon has the Coup, which has special plans attached to it. Still, there’s room for competition. Verizon’s plan provides too many minutes for emergency-only callers, and too few minutes for grandparents who want to talk to their grandchildren. We might be seeing some competition down the road, though, as Clarity has announced an elderly-friendly phone.

Posted in Prepaid Phones on April 8th, 2008
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We’ve been hearing a ton about the Advanced Wireless Services market lately, mainly because Cricket and MetroPCS have rolled out networks. And where there are new networks, there need to be new phones to work on them. What we’ve seen so far is kind of unimpressive, at least by new-fangled cell phone standards. There’s no “awesome” phone among the three announced by Metro and Cricket. But with new players entering the market for AWS handsets, that might change pretty quickly.

Posted in Prepaid Phones on April 8th, 2008
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At 1:30 EDT today, the results of a survey of 1,005 Americans, and a separate one of 110,000 prepaid cell users, will be revealed. Nicholas P. Sullivan, a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be presenting the results. So what should we expect to hear? That the cell phone can be and is a powerful income-generating tool for low-income individuals. Well, at least that’s the interesting part. They’ll also talk about how a large percentage of Americans have used cell phones in emergency situations (with an 81 percent penetration rate, that’s unsurprising).

Posted in Prepaid Phones on March 25th, 2008
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Right from the outside, some prepaid cell users might be saying “what the heck is a SIM card?” Legitimate question, actually. Though SIM cards are commonplace for some of us, for others they’re completely foreign. This is because SIMs are not used by CDMA networks — they’re only used by GSM and iDEN networks. For a fuller explanation of GSM and CDMA networks, you can check out an oldie but goodie on Prepaid Reviews.

Posted in Prepaid Phones on March 24th, 2008
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There has been much focus over the past few days on Virgin Mobile. They didn’t fare too well in the latter part of 2007, causing their stock to decline. And there was also the matter of an ad capitalizing on the scandal of former New York governor Eliot Spitzer. Lost in that fray was the release of Virgin’s first phone with a Spanish language interface: The LG Flare.

Posted in Prepaid Phones on March 17th, 2008
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