Vodafone and cell phones

I'm still learning how to best use the cellular networks in Europe. Vodafone is one of the largest providers (if not the largest), so we started with them to get a feel for connectivity. We kept our American cell phones and chose "pay as you go" SIM cards.

We have 3 phones and its a story of good, bad and ugly. My phone works relatively well. I usually have a connection and the speed isn't bad. My wife's phone rarely works and she finds herself in the Vodafone shop a lot (3 times just yesterday!) My daughters phone is an older iPhone and it just won't support a new SIM card.

It's probably time to buy all new phones, in the UK. We learned that apple has differen app stores in each country and only certain countries have certain apps. From what we can tell, it's not like just connecting to a new App Store with a few clicks, you have to have a credit card registered in that country. We have UK credit cards now, so maybe new phones would deliver a more reliable service.

I'm even still learning how "pay as you go" works. There's a deal called a Freedom Freebee, which sure seems to be the best deal on paper. You pay £10 for unlimited texts, 500 mb data and 150 minutes of calls. It's a bit of a light plan, but it should keep us going. Well, I find the data doesn't quite matchup with how much data my phone says I've used. You can call a free number and it will tell you how much data you have remaining, but that's a bit painful in my humble opinion (there's an app too, but only in the UK App Store). Then, you can automatically renew each month, but it's not just giving them a credit card, you have to "top up" and make sure your balance has enough for the "automatic" charge.

Ok I feel like I'm whining so I'll stop now :) We absolutely appreciate that we have cell phones, and they work in general. We'll figure out all the little bits to keep it going and its worth mentioning that Vodafone support is really quite excellent (in store, phone, and online chat)!