Pros: Inexpensive mobile phone. No contracts to sign. For $30 you get the phone AND 300 minutes of talk time. If you don't like it, you just toss it.
Cons: Poor customer service communications skills. If you ever need to use their customer service, you will be disappointed.
Summary: I had a business friend visiting from Europe. I thought it would be wise to get her a cheap Net10 phone so that she could call me if she needed anything while visiting and to call her family in Europe (since overseas calls are only 15 cents a minute - great price).
Well, I purchased the phone and then activated it on the internet. They gave me a 10 digit number that I assumed was the new phone number. North Carolina area code? Oh well, no matter, it's 10 cents a minute regardless of roaming. The next day I got a message on the phone with the REAL phone number. They gave me a VA phone number, but I wanted a 703 area code and somehow I got a 540 area code. Again, not a biggy, since my friend would be using it.
Gave the phone to my friend and we attempted to make a call to her home in Europe. Service Not Available is what it said. I went home and read on the Net10 website that you have to ACTIVATE the international calling feather FIRST. Why didn't they state this somewhere in the user literature? No problem. I activated the international service online. Then it said it would take up to 72 hours to activate the international feature. Hmmm. So, I waited 3 days. Phone still would not call overseas. Waited till the 4th day - still not working. I activated it again online. Waited another 4 days. Still not working. By this time my friend was already leaving to return to Europe. I ended-up paying much more for her phone calls because she called her family from the hotel I had put her up in. My grand plans of saving money did not work.
I called customer service to explain that I wanted to do two things; change the area code to 703 AND add the international calling feature. The man on the phone said no problem. He got the international calling feature to work in an hour (not days!). But, when I called back to ask about the area code change, I was given the run around. They had to mail me a new SIMM card, and deactivate my phone for a week until it arrived in the mail.
One last feature on my phone that does NOT work is the adding airtime on the phone. When I go to the Add Airtime screen on my Nokia phone, it simply reads Not Available. I added minutes on the internet, but then had to call customer service again when the minutes never showed on my phone after 2 days. They finally solved the problem.
Summary: Cheap phone service. Great for kids or friends from out of town. Just hope you don't have to call their customer service center.
The Phonedog Days of Summer giveaway is coming to a close, but stay tuned for our new "Phonedog One-Paw Bandit Instant Winner Game", coming soon! We'll be giving away an iPhone in the very first week!
