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http://www.virginmobile.com/vm/paymonthlySimOnly.do

Virgin £20.99 - 30 day rolling
SIM card cost FREE
Your tariff gives you:

        600 minutes
        2500 texts
        2.5GB Mobile Web

http://www.virginmobile.com/vm/paymonthlySimOnly.do

I love how they change the contract after you have agreed to it.

I think a lot of these anti-consumer contracts have language that says that they can change the terms of the contract. It's strange, like self-modifying code.

I use a cheap, no-contract (no more than month to month) cell phone company (http://www.virginmobile.com/). Sure it comes with a bit of a lame phone (target market is teenagers), but I can dump them today if I want to. I'm amazed at some of my friends who wonder why I don't get a nicer phone "for free" and sign up with one of major carriers. They complain about their crappy broken phone they can't replace (because they're under contract) or the phone bills that have hundred dollar calls from foreign countries that the company won't dismiss and threaten to send collections...

When my $20 phone finally craps out (had it for over a year now.. no problems), I think I'll try these guys: http://www.straighttalk.com/ServicePlans, relatively cheap decent phones and $45/month unlimited everything. Either that or maybe cricket (http://www.mycricket.com/).

I had Verizon once, and they were okay. I suppose if they come out with a decent phone and a $45/month for everything plan (with no contract), I'll think about going back.

One of the nice things about Virgin Mobile is that if something happens to your phone, you can be back up and running in about as much time as it takes you to buy a phone at the store. I was having a party at my house and an hour before people started showing up, I stepped on my phone and broke it. I quickly ran to a local store and had phone service in about 20 minutes; only missed 3 calls asking for directions. I now keep a spare cheapie in case something like that happens again or if an out-of-country guest needs a phone while they're visiting. I just put $20 on it for them and they're good for a while without worrying about international rates.

How does that work in the USA, where you have to pay to receive calls? (And texts?)

When I was at school (as in, age 14-18 ish) and most of my friends had pre-pay phones and not much money it was quite common for someone to say "you call me, I'm out of credit".

(Actually, that Virgin Mobile USA pre-pay thing confuses me. You buy minutes and texts, but they expire? All the pre-pay deals here just have you add credit to the phone, i.e. add £10 credit Virgin's UK pre-pay rates)

Well, completely wrong is perhaps a bit harsh: ownership of mobile phones is lower in the US than it is in many developing world nations, precisely because a mobile phone is preferable to landline for the reasons that you give but you miss the point that the ownership of mobile phones is far lower in the US than most other developed world nations too.

And it's not all about natural geography or lack of an existing landline infrastructure: mobile phone usage in Scandinavian countries such as Finland and Sweden is fantastic. In fact, if I remember correctly, in Finland over 90 percent of the people have a mobile phone.

As for mobile phones being expensive, well, that's free market capitalism working for you. In Britain, where caller party pays like almost everywhere else (ie, if you call me then you foot the bill and it doesn't cost me a thing), I have a pay as you go mobile phone that cost me £35 (~$75) to buy, and which costs me pennies a day to use and with no contract whatsoever. And it's as reliable as anything else, plus it's portable. (Of course, if I wanted to use my mobile phone more extensively, then I have a range of options available to me from the various UK operators.)

From the anecdotal evidence that keeps cropping up on Slashdot and elsewhere, it very much seems to me that mobile phone ownership being synonymous with costing heaven and earth is an American phenomenon.

If there's one thing that Virgin does well, it is actually honesty.

Witness Virgin UK's mobile phone SIM pack. Take any GSM phone. They will give you tips (or they did when I did it) on unlocking the phone from your previous operator. Insert the new SIM.

You can set up regular debit card payment if you want international calls - or you can pay as you go.

• No monthly charge
• Cheap calls
• No contract, however you pay
• No down payment at all, even to join.
• Bring your number at no charge.
• See all your billing online, however you pay.
• Never pay for incoming calls.

But perhaps more importantly - they tell you all of this in plain English.

I find it sort of painful to see my two favorite benevolent companies at odds like this.

I don't need a point, it's your job to come up with whatever conclusion you want to come up with. I stand by the facts I presented -- they're all verifiable in the press and on the web.

The fact that Hop-on still has a web site with cell phones on it doesn't bother me. It's been three years already and its web site still doesn't have a disposable cardboard phone for under $30, a claim that made them one of the most heavily hyped companies in the world. If a web site like Napster or a small outfit like Virgin Mobile has its own brand, it's entirely possible for such a successful scam like Hop-on to still be worth something and even have its own "line" of phones.

I wonder how many of those hits were for the sleezy sex site virginmobile. I was blocked at a youth hostel from checking my phone stats online (after paying their ripoff rates) and told I shouldn't be looking at sex sites at a YH. WTF?

I had a bunch of resumes out with my cell number on them. (And I really didn't want to punch my whole address book into a new phone!)

If you were with a GSM provider, I presume you could have kept your number when transferring to another provider via a PAC (Port Authorization Code). At least you can do that here in the UK - I recently did it.

As for putting the phonebook into a new phone, well... that's maybe a one-hour job at worst, and if you buy a new phone that has connectivity to a computer, you can probably start synchronizing the phonebook that way instead.

Safety Precautions

Do not use your mobile phone in a microwave oven; this may cause damage to self, the oven or the phone.
Link to manual

You're a virgin to this whole pun thing, aren't you?

I guess we'd better sprint down to the store before they're sold out!
Someone making a post as bad as that must be a Virgin

500 pages long with 3 zillion transactions

Calls are 25 cents a minute for the first 10 minutes in any day, and 10 cents a minute for the rest of the day. There are other services that can be billed to my account as well. I have to 'top up' by adding a minimum of $20 to my account every 90 days, and I never use that much airtime, which is why I like the service. Even if I did use it more than that, it'd still be way less than the conventional accounts are.

Yes. By crippling the runtime, all you get are crippled apps.

If you look at the phones in a UK phone vendor, say

Virgin Mobile, you will see that java is not sold directly, instead 'downloadable games'. And they list it second, after 'downloadable ringtones'.

So there we have it, the cross platform language intended to replace the windows API is, in its sole 'post-PC' client configuration, used to sell phones, after downloadable ringtones.

Maybe the next iteration will improve, but the 1.0 version was so minimal it was useless for anything 'interesting'. It is only if this happens that java on phones will deliver anything better than shockwave-on-phones could do.

For the 7 months I've had it the service has been great, phone has worked fine, and everything has run smoothly.

Since then I've convinced three people close to me to get their own. They, too, disregarded cell phones because of the daunting costs, but have found the occasional usage quite convenient.

You can get a cell phone from Virgin for $60. Talk time is 25 cents a minute for the first 10 minutes, and 10 cents after that. What's so great about that? NO PLAN. You just buy these cards with extra minutes on them whenever you need more time to talk. Why should I spend $38 a month on home phone service? I rarely talk on the phone. Even if I make one 4-minute call each day, it'll still only add up to $30 a month. For the young single person, these are perfect.