<p>Wow, what a wealth of information! Thank you to everyone who has replied so far. We’ll be looking in to several of these options.(…but still waiting for someone to tell me how to disguise myself as a 17 year old and go on some of these trips myself!)
D won’t be taking a laptop and most of the “usual suspects” who text daily will be with her, so leaving a “don’t leave a message” on her voice mail might cut out the incoming calls to a managable rate.<br>
Meanwhile, it’s off to seek shoes that blend in to stylish Europe for a girl who prefers checkerboard patterned Vans. She’s hoping not to stand out as an American quite so much in a crowd…</p>
<ul>
<li>WARNINGS * WARNINGS * WARNINGS *</li>
</ul>
<p>The Cingular RAZR will work fine in Europe, but two big caveats:</p>
<ol>
<li>To use a European SIM card, the phone MUST BE UNLOCKED first. Cingular will do this for you. Call customer service and ask for the 800 number for this service. They can email you the unlock code.</li>
<li><p>If she uses a European SIM, she will have a European telephone number, so make sure she call or texts it to you.</p></li>
<li><p>Call Cingular or AT&T or MCI or whoever your LD carrier is and sign up for the super-cheap international calling plan for the time she’s in Europe. It’ll cost you about $10 a month or so, but you’ll only do it for one month. For her, incoming calls will probably be free and for you it will only be pennies a minute to call her. My son was in New Zealand with his phone and I called about 4 times a day - for 8 cents a minute!! Then, when she comes home, call and cancel the plan.</p></li>
<li><p>MAJOR WARNING: If you do use international roaming, beware. Her use in the country might only be 99 cents per minute, BUT when all her friends use her normal number to call, it will be forwarded to her cell phone in Europe and AN INTERNATIONAL LONG DISTANCE charge will be added to that 99 cents. And that Intl LD charge will be at the highest premium rate. I got charged $5.00 per minute by AT&T in addition to the 99 cents a minute for my incoming US calls. And that was only to Mexico City. YIKES - An unpleasant surprise when my bill came in.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>For a spring break trip, it makes no sense to get a local SIM chip – there is no one for them to call locally. My daughter spent 4 months in Russia and still never used or needed to use her cell phone calls in Russia – after all, the local phones will do for that. </p>
<p>Even though my daughter’s US friends went nuts sending her text messages when they figured out how to do it, she did not get a single voice call from them – I think that was just a matter of telling people in advance not to call her. I was glad to have her number and be able to call her … there were a couple of times when it was reassuring to be able to reach her quickly (she was in Russia during what seemed like a wave of terrorist incidents). </p>
<p>As to the text messaging rates - it depends on the plan. Cingular is morphing into ATT so things might be changing, but at least for us at the time, the $9.99 monthly plan came with 1000 text messages and with all messages after the first 1000 billed at 3 cents a message – but the plans with the Razr might be different. So the main thing is to switch to whatever plan will save money for that month… and then of course can switch it off later on.</p>