$45 Sraight Talk UNL.

You are right Irondog....the Verizon phones are CDMA and the AT&T phones are GSM. They have 2 smart phones, both use AT&T. All the rest are CDMA. The service is very good in 95% of the Eastern 2/3 of the country. I can not say about the other third, we never drive there. The area through Oklahoma on Hwy 69 is not a good one at all and a few places in Ohio. Other than that, they do well. The phones, whether CDMA or GSM, use the prepaid towers. So if you want to see the coverage areas, you need to look at these maps...they are different than the contract service. The internet is very good on the CDMA phones, but very limited. The internet on the GSM phones can be slow and annoying. Customer service is about the only big complaint you will find if you do a Google search. Well, the younger generation complains about alot of things pertaining to Straight Talk, but they want alot for nothing. My husband and I have had our phones for months. He has the cheapest no frills phone they have which is CDMA so uses Verizon prepaid towers. I have the Nokia E 71 smart phone which is GSM and runs off of AT&T towers. I will tell you that his service is far better than mine and his internet is far faster. I use his phone to read news and mine to go onto Facebook. One more thing....if you decide to buy at straighttalk.com .....DO NOT buy refurbished phones. There are alot of complaints with these and I personally can vouch for that. Overall...well worth the $30 or $45 a month if you want to basically talk and text.(Do not try to tether to a PC...they will boot you and you will not be able to use them again).

 

Hi, just looking for the straight talk on the Smart Talk phones @ WalMart. Like everybody just trying to lower expenses. I don't want to be out on the road and find that Smart Talk was a big error. It sounds like as long as you don't have an android phone you've got good coverage. (Smart Talk's coverage maps) Thanks for the input as I have until Jan 7, 2012 when my ATT contract expires (started with the old bag phones on the truck in 1994) I'll be keeping an eye on this post. Drivers, Thanks for all your hard work, it ain't easy out there.

 

my phone works great I like it better than my blackberry $45 a month is hard to beat, I have the nokia phone I had email and phone service down I 10 and back I 40 I went down some goat trail to get back to Georgia and didn't have service up in the hills

 

Thanks, appreciate the feedback!

 

There's several threads on this. I'll add to this one, the phones are cheaper off the straighttalk.com website.

It'll ask you what zip you plan to use it in. To make sure you get the Verizon network you can compare your zip code with the phones offered with my zip 37332. The next town over is ATT, zip 37321.

I got the Samsung 355C off the website for $20 while Walmart sells it for $50.

 

Thanks, CC. I did notice that when I was on the Straight Talk website. It will be home based in 38334. The area is a pretty large ATT pocket of coverage.

 

Because I live in Canada and we get screwed on cell phone plans, especially when traveling in the US, I picked up a Net10 LG900 for $30 and the $50 Unlimited card at a TA. The phone itself looks a lot like a Blackberry.

What they don't tell you is it isn't even a 3G phone (although the web browsing is pretty speedy), you can't make international calls or send international texts on the Unlimited plan, and the phone does not support streaming video.

If you step down to the $25 750 minute plan, you can sign up for international calling. You can even sign up for a plan that assigns up to 3 Canadian phone numbers for your north of the border friends to call so they don't pay for international long distance when calling you. The first month I used this I didn't quite use all 750 minutes, but my Canadian cell phone bill came down by over $100.

The browser it comes with is really clunky, so the first thing I did was download the Opera Mini browser. That helped a LOT.

Net10 now offers Android 3G smartphones so I'll probably try that next.