Can I rent a cell phone for the weekend?
I don’t have a cell phone but from time to time I drive out of town in the winter. I live in Toronto. I’m usually by myself and would feel safer if I had a cell phone in case of emergencies but I don’t want to go to the trouble of signing up for a phone I might only use once or twice a year. Is there such a thing as renting a phone for a short period of time?
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7 Answers
Might this work? I’ll look for other services, just hang on.
This one also looks promising. The others I was looking at from a quick search query appeared somewhat cheesy.
Why not just buy a disposable phone? Some are as cheap as $10–20, and you don’t have to rent it. Its yours to keep for as long as you need it. You can buy them with a prepaid allotment of minutes and then either buy a phone card for more minutes or a totally new phone. I’ve seen them for sale at Walmart and other big chain stores (even pharmacies in the US).
I’m sure you have Radio Shack in Canada. What I found there was the AT&T Go Phone for $19.99 (US) that includes $10 airtime. But the real beauty is you keep the phone and pay just for your minutes. The best deal is you can buy $100 in minutes to use during an entire year and extra minutes carry forward. Like you, I don’t use a cell very often but it is almost impossible to find public phones any more.
The rental phone above is $16 a weekend, the GoPhone is $8/mo. There is no contract so that’s why it is called disposable but I have been using it for 3 years and it works great.
@galileogirl We used to have Radio Shack but for some reason they all got replaced by stores called “The Source” by Circuit City.
Fido has some nice prepaid plans. If you go to your nearest Walmart they have prepaid phones on a shelf that you can just grab and take to the counter that are about 50–100$ and usually have some airtime included for free.
I don’t know if you have Virgin Mobile in your area, but I know they have a phone for $10 and then you can refill with minutes as you need. It would probably be a lot easier than renting a phone.
I’ve had a Net10 phone for almost three years now. I like it very much. The first one (I’ve replaced the handset once, after I realized how much I liked it) was $30, and included $30 worth of air time—at ten cents per minute, that was 300 minutes of talk time over a 3-month span.
After the three months (or 300 minutes) you need to renew by purchasing more air time, or just let the time and minutes expire. (Unused minutes roll over into the next 3-month period, and I’ve never used 100 minutes per month, anyway, so my minutes keep building.)
Cheap insurance and convenience, since I’m not one who lives on the phone anyway.
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