Now that we’ve already discussed the Pay as You Go Plan, let’s talk about T-Mobile’s unlimited talk/text plan.

There are two unlimited prepaid plans for T-Mobile. One plan is truly an unlimited plan while the other one is a type of an unlimited prepaid hybrid.

For $50 you can purchase unlimited talk time, text message and pictures/video messaging. There’s no need to pay another dime after spending your $50.

If you don’t want to spend $50 a month, you can purchase the $15 option. With the $15 prepaid plan you get unlimited text messaging, picture and video messaging but you must pay $.10 a minute on all domestic calls.

The $15 a month plan sounds like the perfect solution for anyone who has a teenager. Teenagers spend more time texting, video messaging and picture messaging more than talking. Why pay $50 a month when $15 a month would satisfy their requirements.

All T-Mobile Phones

As mentioned in the earlier post, all T-Mobile prepaid plans come with nationwide long distance, no roaming, voicemail, caller ID, call waiting and three-way calling. If you’re not one who wants to count pennies and calculate available air time, the T-Mobile Unlimited plan is the way to go.

Limited Time Offer: If you hurry and activate your T-Mobile phone prior to 9/28/10, you get a $10 discount for the first three months. It’s a limited time offer so hopefully you’re reading this prior to September 28th (here’s some of the fine print).

We talked about the T-Mobile coverage area and the phones in the last post.  Now it’s time to talk about the Pay as You Go prepaid plan.

According to their website, the Pay as You Go prepaid plan touts rates as low as 10 cents per minute. That’s true as long as you purchase the $100 airtime refill which will give you 1,000 minutes (thus 10 cents a minute). However, if you buy a T-Mobile refill of a smaller denomination, your per minute rate goes up. Here’s what they offer in refills:

* Rates rounded up to the nearest penny

T-Mobile Gold Rewards Program

The T-Mobile Pay as You Go prepaid plan offers what they call Gold Rewards. With Gold Rewards you receive 15% more airtime minutes on all refills. To Gold Reward status kicks in after you purchase $100 in refills.

The real perk with Gold Rewards is that your airtime that would normally expire in 90 days doesn’t expire for a year. Therefore, the Gold Rewards per minute airtime cost looks something like this:

* Rates rounded up to the nearest penny

The $15 refill isn’t offered in the Gold Reward program (at least it wasn’t mentioned on the T-Mobile site). From what I can see, it doesn’t make sense to purchase the $15 refill anyway.   The more time you buy, your rate should be cheaper, not remain the same.

It appears that the 15% more air time does not apply for the $100 refill card option.

T-Mobile Text Messaging Rates

It will cost you 10 cents to send and 5 cents to receive text message in the US and Canada and .35 to send and .05 to receive anywhere else. If you send and receive picture and video messages that costs 25 cents to send and receive.

Activating the T-Mobile Phone

You must activate the phone online. When you activate it you get to select your Pay as You Go prepaid plan, insert your basic info, SIM card number, phone serial number and select your pin. Once you activate your phone you’re good to go. The phone comes preloaded with airtime but you’ll need to purchase more.

Where to Purchase Airtime

There are a host of locations from which you can purchase airtime refills for your T-Mobile prepaid phone. There is a location finder search option on the T-Mobile site.

If you don’t want to physically go to a location to purchase airtime, you can buy additional time using the phone itself by dialing *ADD (or visiting t-zones/web2go from your T-Mobile phone). Go to “My Account” and then choose “Refill.”

Pay by The Day Option

While we’re still discussing the Pay as You Go prepaid cell phone plan, it’s a good time to mention that T-Mobile also has a Pay by the Day plan. For this plan you pay $1 a day for each day you use the phone. You can make unlimited T-Mobile to T-Mobile calls, but all other domestic calls costs 10 cents per minute.

Next: The Unlimited Talk Plan

I can’t believe I didn’t do a review on the T-Mobile prepaid cell phone plan.

T-Mobile offers two different types of prepaid plans. They have the Unlimited prepaid plan or the Pay-as-You-Go plan.

Before we discuss the plans and the difference between the two I think is important to find out about the coverage area. I found all too often that I get excited about a prepaid plan, like the features, the phones and the calling rates but the minute I look at the coverage area I find out that the plan doesn’t cover my area. I’ve since learned the hard way review the cell phone coverage area before I go any further.

Calling Coverage Area

So first things first, here’s the T-Mobile calling coverage area.

T-Mobile Area Coverage Map

Don’t let the green fool you. Visit their site, insert your zip code to see if you live in an area where you can get good reception. T-Mobile’s coverage search will display a map of your local area shaded in various degrees of green. Dark green means excellent light green means moderate. If you find that your area is gray or white opt for another prepaid cell phone service because you’ll have a difficult time finding a signal.

After searching the T-Mobile voice coverage, click on the data coverage tab to find out if you could surf the Web from your phone. Similar to the voice map you’ll find a map with various shades of purple; the darker the purple the faster the mobile web.

T-Mobile Prepaid Cell Phones

Confirming that there’s coverage in my area, I decided to check out the phones. I’m not sure if T-Mobile displays available phones based on zip code because some prepaid cell phone providers only offer certain model phones in certain areas so the information that I am sharing next may be for my local area only. That being said, when I click to review their phone selection I found that they offer a collection of 5 phones manufactured by Nokia, Samsung and T-Mobile

T-Mobiles cell phones ranged in price from $19.99 for the Nokia 1661 (that includes an instant discount of $30) to $119.99 for the T-Mobile Tap (which also included a $30 instant discount).

Features ranged from Bluetooth technology, camera phones, speaker phones and more. One thing I did note is that these phones were not designed with seniors in mind. The number pads and screens were pretty small, except for the T-Mobile Tap which has a nice sized screen.

Selecting the T-Mobile Prepaid Cell Phone Plan

Now that we know T-Mobile provides coverage in the area and I’ve selected my phone, its time to take a look at how much service will cost. I’ll start with the T-Mobile Pay As You Go Plan.

Next: T-Mobile Pay as You Go Plan

For some reason some people still think that prepaid cell phones don’t have the same capabilities as monthly contract cell phones.
That’s not quite true. Even prepaid cell phones can receive text messages from email addresses.

How to Send a Text via Email

To send a text message to a pre paid cell phone via email is the same as sending one to a contract phone. There are two very important things that are required:

1. The 10 digit cell phone number
2. The Cell phone service provider

Each cell phone service provider has an SMS address (which usually takes on the form of @name.com) which allows computer folks to send text messages to cell phone folks. The 10 digits appearing before the @name.com is the recipient’s cell phone number, and the @name.com is the cell phone provider’s messaging address. You’re on your own when it comes to the cell phone number, but I can help you with the cell phone service provider’s SNS address.

Listed below are the @name.coms for some of the most popular cell phone providers.

Emailing the Text Message

Now that we have all of the necessary info, it’s time to send the text. So, if I were to send a text message to my friend on the Nextel network, I would open my email program, insert the 10 digit phone number followed by the SMS address in the “To” line. I would then send a short message (remember it’s SMS which stands for short message service) to my friend.

For brevity sake, I usually send the entire message in the “Subject” line, keeping in mind that it’s a text message and not a regular email. Once I start typing in the body of the email program, I know for sure that my message will be too long for the cell phone to accept. The maximum character length of a text message usually falls somewhere around 160 characters.

After I finish my “Subject” text message, I send it. Simple as pie.

If you’re undecided as to which pay as you go service to use, there is one factor that cannot be ignored when making a decision. You have to make sure that the wireless cell phone provider has service in your area.

To make it a little easier to find the coverage location of the various providers, below are links to the national coverage maps for several prepaid wireless cell phone providers. Once you have confirmed that there is coverage in your area, you can take the search to the next level.

By clicking on the national coverage map below, you’ll be taken to the wireless provider’s current coverage map. The maps as displayed below are current as of January, 2009. Be advised, however that although the maps may display as providing wireless coverage in many locations, check with each cell phone provider as the national coverage map is much different than the regionally available plans.

National coverage maps display where phone service is available and whether roaming charges apply or not. It is not an indication as to whether or not the wireless provider offers a prepaid plan in your area. For that you must contact the wireless service provider.

National Coverage Maps
AT&T GoPhone	Alltel Pay Per Day
Boostmobile PayGo Plan	Jump Mobile Prepaid Wireless
Kajeet	Net 10
TMobile	TracFone
US Cellular	Verizon INPulse Plan

Additions (and subtractions) are made to this list quarterly.