Would appreciate advice on smart phones.

[yonder]

12. Tracphone prepaid

I'm like yourself, not a big phone user, don't need a lot of bells and whistles. 7 bucks a month. I really only buy a card to extend the service date deadline, not the minutes, texting or data. I'm using a 2 or 3 year old Samsung Stardust. With a SD card it has some 60+ gigabytes of memory and is about 2/3 full of mostly music. I think it's a 3g so it ain't the latest by any means. Yes, it is outdated, sometimes a bit slow and clunky but it works just fine for me.

Now, from the stories I've heard, dealing with Tracphone can be a nightmare. So far, for me, it hasn't been that bad. The worst was losing a bunch of minutes trying to move them from an old semi-smartphone to this one, as well as at first spending a bit of time with their CS folks. I'd say the less you have to deal with them the better. But so far, so good.

When this phone craps out, I might continue to use Tracphone but my wife and kids are hounding me to get on their Verizon plan to reduce their bill. I think they said it would be 50 bucks a month for each of us. That seems high to me but that might include a new phone(s). Seems like they have all the latest stuff too where I'm a semi-Luddite. Still 7 bucks a month works for me and like I said, so far so good.

Hope this helps rather than muddy up the waters.