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Pug
The Movie Geek
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Joined: 21 Aug 2003
Posts: 8924
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 Posted: 03/23/04 - 15:58 Post subject: Product Review: Audiovox 8500 (Virgin Mobile)
This phone is a Virgin Mobile pre-pay phone, and I owned it for three months before decided to write this review. How this phone works is simple: you purchase the phone from a store (Amazon, Best Buy, Target, etc) and call Virgin Mobile to activate the phone. Customer Service will take your information and activate the phone in your name and give you a phone number for your new cell phone. You will then have 10 dollars worth of time on your phone. You will want to then purchase a top-up card to put more money on the phone. At least twenty dollars must be topped-up every three months or your number will not be active anymore. Another way to top up is to have your credit card charged instead. One note about this: Virgin Mobile does not accept Discover Card, so if you have Discover, you will have to purchase a top-up card (as I had to).
Once you have your phone and it is activated and charged up, it works like any other cell phone. Because this is a pre-pay phone, this phone is likely best suited for those who do not intend on using it very often as well as it being the first phone for a teenager. Virgin Mobile charges twenty five cents a minute for the first ten minutes of use every day and I believe it is ten cents a minute after that. While twenty five cents is a lot per minute, if you are not using the phone very often it can be a good value because there is no monthly fee. The one thing to note about the charges for the phone is that the rate is the first ten minutes you are using the phone every day. This means that if you only use the phone for 4 minute on Monday you are charged twenty five cents a minute, and if you then use the phone for 9 minutes on Tuesday you are still charged twenty five cents for each of those minutes. Obviously there is a greater value the more minutes you use in a day, but if you are going to use the phone that much then you might want to consider a regular cell phone plan. Text messages are ten cents per message you send. Receiving the text messages is free.
Overall, this was an excellent phone for my initial needs. I had it for three months and it served me well. It was only inside a building (such as a mall or a department store) that my reception failed. Otherwise I had no problems with the signal within the Twin Cities area. Obviously I cannot speak for other regions of the country. My needs for a cell phone changed and I purchased a different model with an actual service plan rather than a prepay phone, but this was the perfect phone for my first cell phone. It helped me realize what my needs would be and what sort of value I would get out of a particular cell phone.
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