on Your comment is awaiting moderation. Fri, 19th Mar 2010 9:26 am

I did use one of these recently while in the USA. Despite asking lots of questions about charges and reading through all the data on the website, it would have been cheaper for me to use my UK phone for the following reasons:
1. You are charged for calls whether they connect or not
2. Your callers are charged for calls whether they connect to you or not
3. The phone did not work for 4 days out of the 7 I was there and after hours of camping outside an internet cafe waiting for tech support messages to come back to me, and 3 days later it was identified as ‘ a network problem with the US supplier’
4. The cost of calls to my number was exhorbitant. They get around this by saying that ‘it varies, ask you Service Provider’. However, what they fail to mention is that this is classified as a ‘PREMIUM SERVICE’ number. If this was in the FAQs I would not have bought this phone.
5. My phone,though switched off, is continuing to absorb charges against my ‘credit’ of 25p every other day. This may be because someone tried to call me? who knows? – but in the FAQs, there is no mention of you being charged if people call you and your phone is switched off. I have no voicemail to pick up.

BTW, the total cost for people to call me, plus the sim set up, plus the extra credits, plus the calls I had to make while the phone was not working amounted to a little over £365, and this was for calls to about 7 different numbers (4 UK, 3 US) and no more that about 30 calls, of which only about 10 lasted more than 10 minutes.

On the plus side, when it did work, the calls were quite clear.