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Holiday Gift Guide 2005

Intro Consider Prepaid Keep On Talking Feature Focus Comments 6

Dec 1, 2005, 5:50 AM by Eric Lin

A cheat sheet for choosing the perfect phone to give. Find exactly what they're hoping for.

For those of you who are thinking about giving someone special a cell phone for the holidays, but have held off because you wanted to be sure you buy the right phone, we're here to help you make the right decision. We've done all the work for you, narrowing down the best choices for every person on your gift list on every national carrier. Because you have many people on your gift list, we've limited our selections to phones that sell for $250, most cost much less — especially with a contract.

We believe the first step in choosing the right phone for someone is to choose the right carrier. The freedom to choose a carrier near you with the best coverage, calling plans or just the one he's been on forever ensures the gift recipient the best experience once he or she has the right phone to use on that network. To choose what phone to buy your loved ones as a gift, you need to consider how they're going to use it. Some people are still a bit scared of mobile phones and may only want them "for emergencies." At the other end of the spectrum are people who will try to do everything on their phone; and of course most folks actually fall somewhere in between. Find the type of person you're buying for, and in most cases you'll find a phone for him on whichever network you deem the best choice.

After you've picked out the pefect phone, there's still one more thing to do. When you or the lucky person you're giving a phone to has moved everything off of the old phone, don't just toss it in your junk drawer or a closet corner, recycle it. If you want to know anything about phone recycling, from reasons to do it to where to take your phone, check out our Cell Phone Recycling Guide.

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Comments

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This forum is closed.

Rocky63215

Dec 15, 2005, 5:58 AM

Don't Get Prepaid

👿

Do not get prepaid especially if it's Cingulair. I worked for a company doing prepaid payments and if you want to lose your money then go right ahead. People actually think it's cheaper then having a post paid account got news for you it's not. If you have concerns or problems or just general questions that you need to talk to a supervisor, be prepared to wait on hold for over 30 minutes mostly it was for 45 minutes or longer. Also, no ability to transfer to customer care at all. Also the other companies were able to tell you the minutes you got with payment unfortunately Cingulair never gave that info out, so they would need to make another phone call to talk to customer care to see how many minutes were put on if they were on a ...
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nikg

Dec 12, 2005, 12:54 PM

Prepaid Coverage

Keep in mind that most prepaid offerings DO NOT include ROAMING, so if you are looking into prepaid be sure to check the prepaid coverage, specifically for Cingular, as their Post-Paid coverage maps do not show where you are roaming.

djdelay

Dec 1, 2005, 7:56 PM

nice article

I thought it was a good article, but have two comments.

1. You recommended 3 Blackberry phones. Does this mean that you guys feel that the pending injunction from NTP is a non-threat?

2.

eric Lin said:
Parents, do your kids a favor and buy them some street cred.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

KevC84

Great job on the article. Covered everything from the pre-paid and basic phones, to high end phones. My only thoughts, nothing was mentioned about Sprint iDEN although iDEN was atleast mentioned by the presence of Boost Mobile. 7100i from Nextel would...
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eric Lin

djdelay, while i do suspect that rim will be hit with a big fine in the final ruling, i also believe that an injunction temporary or permanent, is unlikely. i weighed that when recommending these phones.

despite this week's rulings and statements a...
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