With the Prepaid plan there are no contracts. You pay for a certain number of minutes in advance, they warn you when they are nearly up; and will cut you off when they are up. (You have a period when you can buy more time and be automatically reactivated. Or you can buy more minutes before what you have are all used up.) One thing you don't get is a monthly statement with the prepaid plan.
I bought two of these phones, one with an Arizona number, and the other with a northern Utah number. The Quartzsite one is the Samsung X495, and the Utah one is a Nokia 6010. The Samsung is a flip phone and cost roughly $99 and the Nokia cost $29.99 ($59.99 at the store with a $30 mail in rebate.) For my money the Samsung is definitely not worth the additional price.
With either phone you get 60 minutes of air time, good for 60 days. (From anywhere in the USA, to anywhere in the USA, any time.) If in that time you, for some reason, don't like the phone you could just trash it, and be out $29.99 Otherwise: You can buy a Prepaid minutes card for from $10 up through $100. After you have bought $100 worth of minutes you become a "Gold Rewards customer" and get about 15% more minutes on additional cards. Once you are a "Golds Reward customer" whenever you add minutes any unused minutes you had plus the additional ones are good for another full year.
I recommend buying the $100 card for 1,000 additional minutes before the initial minutes are all used. Then you are a Golds Reward customer, with over 1000 minutes to use over the next year. If near the end of the year you still have some of the 1000 minutes left, as little as $10 will extend the unused time a full year from the date you add the aditional minutes, and add the additional minutes of the card. (With a $10 addition you pay a little more per minute than you do with a $100 card.)
For those who only want to have a cell phone in case of an emergency, they need only pay $10 per year after the initial outlay of $129.99 until they have used the 1000+ minutes. I don't think you can beat that price! Furthermore, if something comes up where you make lots of phone calls the price will never be more than 10 cents per minute, even if in one month you use thousands of minutes. With T-mobile's pre-paid you just pay for what you use.
When I had Verizon, I was writing out a check every month for around $43, even if I only used ten minutes in the month. I got 300 peak minutes per month; and if I went over that I was hit with 40 cents per minute. An additional 100 peak minutes bumped my bill by about $50 time the taxes were added on. The bottom line: I was always running scared and rarely ever used near the 300 minutes in any one month. My average use was less than 200 minutes a month. Switching to T-Mobile cut my cell phone bill for a year to less than I was paying each month; and gives me better service: Now I use my cell phone when I want and never have to fret about going over the 300 minutes. Any time I can dial #999# and get a text message telling how many minutes are left, at no cost.
Before you buy check T-Mobile's prepaid web site for the latest deals, and their "Coverage". Currently their prepaid coverage does not include the "850MHz roaming" areas on their maps. T-Mobile does not have any Cell Phone numbers local to Quartzsite. You might as well get a cell phone number local to an area where it would be cheaper for friends or relatives to call you. Unfortunately: T-Mobile's computer system has a problem shipping to a address in Quartzsite, AZ. I find it easiest to decide what you want, from their web site, and then buy it when you find a T-Mobile store.
The ten cents per minute is exactly that, for a $100 bill you get 1,000 anytime minutes. There are no additional State and Federal taxes tacked on, and In California, there is no sales tax on the additional minutes. Obviously, this is the best deal I have found for cellular phone service. So good, I bought the Utah phone just so when I am in Utah I can have a local number. About ten months of the year it probably will not be used at all. Unless, I decide to loan it to someone when we are out roaming around and would like to have cell phone contact.
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