Just a 46-year-old mom of 2 in Northern California. My kids are Monkey Monkey(MM) and Drama Llama (DL). I am married to Monkey Hubby (MH). Just wondering if anyone has bought any dumb phones lately. Where have you been buying your dumb phones? (Specifically, flip phones).
Dh's family is switching over to Ting with the latest promo. (They had just talked about how his mom wanted to splurge on some fancy phone and switch over to Ting. So getting $100 credit to sign up was pretty enticing and they were already getting ready to switch).
Dh really doesn't like the idea of buying phones on Craigslist, generally. But to be fair our phones are on the more expensive end. Not necessarily worth the risk. But anyway, to speed along the transition, he did pick up a couple of used dumb phones yesterday for $25/each. He told me he could not find them anywhere otherwise. I think at the least his Grandma might want something a little more new and nice, but will see. This does get them set up. (His mom will get the new smart phone and his sister has some old hand-me-down that she can set up on Ting's GSM. His dad just wants a dumb phone for whatever reason).
I think the GSM makes the switch much easier. When we switched it was from Sprint and we could just all keep our phones. Dh's family is on Verizon and so they will need all different phones for the switch. That's been the big obstacle though dh talked them into Ting a long time ago. I think they will be saving about $150/month with Ting. (They had just told dh they didn't care about the phone outlay and were sick of their giant Verizon bill and had some extra money. Good timing! All that and his mom is the only one spending more than $25 on a phone anyway. But I guess it's because of the GSM that his sister can use the hand-me-down).
Dumb Phones?
May 30th, 2015 at 12:29 pm
May 30th, 2015 at 03:51 pm 1433001109
May 30th, 2015 at 05:01 pm 1433005291
P.S. Ting does have a dumb phone for sale today but I guess it wasn't there yesterday! (I asked dh what was wrong with it - I thought it just wasn't what he wanted).
May 31st, 2015 at 04:33 am 1433046784
May 31st, 2015 at 12:26 pm 1433075163
Tracfone still have several flip phones, and they are also available for double minutes. However, I am not sure if they will work on the Sprint (Ting) network....
Well, I just did a quick check off of the first example I found, which is the LG 440. It runs on CDMA 850/1900. According to Wikipedia, 1900 MHz is available, but not 850.... So, I think it should work but am not sure. The idea is maybe you can put your hubby to work on matching the bands to find out what exactly will work.
However, any phones from Sprint, Boost Mobile, and Virgin Mobile should work as they all work off of Sprint's own network (as well as Ting). With that in mind, Sprint right now is offering 3 different flip phones off their site. Boost Mobile has the same 3 phones and an additional 4th. Virgin Mobile Mobile has just 2 of the phones, but they are all essentially the same.
Now, if you are having a hard time buying them from these places, you can also double check Amazon for them. Just as an example, here's the Alcatel OneTouch Retro being sold off of Amazon for about $20. It's prepaid, so you shouldn't have any trouble activating it on the Ting network.
Lastly, you can also try brick and mortar places such as Sprint stores to Target as someone else has suggested. I wrote all this in haste, so hopefully it made sense and was helpful.
May 31st, 2015 at 05:01 pm 1433091699
June 1st, 2015 at 01:59 pm 1433167186