Using your own phone in switching to a pre-paid mobile phone plan

If you know me, you know that the phone is not my favored means of communication. In fact, it falls in last place behind in-person, e-mail, text messages, and using soup cans connected by a taut string or elastic band.

Current mobile phone plans, besides just being amazingly expensive for what you get, do not make sense for me. I have had months where I use 20 minutes of my plan. Part of this is that the weekend/evening minutes do not show up, and the other is I am working to migrate my voice communication to "internet phone" VOIP systems such as Gizmo.

But, I did not know much about pre-paid phone plans. Did they support text messaging? mobile internet? what was the coverage? The basic answer to these questions is that they do everything your contract-style plan can do. You can even migrate your number, if that is something you want.

The different companies each offer a myriad of options to choose from. I used about.com's handy calculator/questionairre that asks about 12 questions and then gives you the best plans to fit your needs. Mine came out to $6.75-$8.50 per month.

But none of the sites used for my research would answer this question: Can I use my own phone, or am I stuck with the cheap phone that comes in the package?

Well, I ended up making my decision by purchasing the cheapest phone possible, a $20 phone from AT&T which included $10 worth of credit. After activation, I took the SIM chip that came with the pre-paid phone and popped it into my much nicer Nokia phone, turned on the phone and it works like a charm.

So, if you are thinking of trying out a pre-paid plan but already have a phone you like, I would recommend getting the cheapest phone you can find and simply switching the SIM chip. Remember, however, that if your phone is not "unlocked", this technique will likely only work by using a pre-paid phone that is on the same network as your current phone.