Buy Mobile Phone at Glasgow Airport
 

We will be arriving at 8:25am on Sunday. Are there any stores in the airport I can buy an unlocked phone and SIM pack from?

Why wait....you can buy an unlocked tri band phone (the nokia 3100 is a very good buy from www.mobilebee.com (you can get a dual band for a few bucks cheaper) and from www.L8shop.net, you can buy a British Virgin Mobile sim pack for £3 and they ship to the US for £3 for a total of £6 which comes with £5 worth of call caredit, no registration is necessary, you will know your British phone number and have a functioning British mobile phone the instant you step off the phone...Virgin Mobile UK requires no registration, insert the sim card and you're done!

Thanks for the links. Looks like ebay is the best route for the phone price wise.

How does the pay as you talk work. Go you have to call and give them a credit card or keep buying SIM cards?

should be "do you" instead of go you

The British pay as you go system is particularly easy...

With a virgin mobile (and other, but virgin mobile on the whole is simplest and easiest to understand and use as it requires no registration and comes with the number), you get a card that looks like a credit card called an electronic swipe card. You go into most any large grocery chain, or service station or drug store or mobile phone store and say, "I want to top up my account with £5 (or whatever), the merchant runs the card through his credit card terminal and asks you for £5 (or your credit card) and voila done!

Virgin mobile rates are: 15p/minute timed to the second (5p minimum) for the first 5 minutes of use each day to UK landlines or other virgin mobile phones, 5p/minute (timed to the second again but with 5p minimum) thereafter. Calls to North America are 20p/minute again timed to the second (5p minimum) and the time you talk to North America counts towards the 5 minutes daily use described above. Text messages are something like 3p or 5p each somewhat more to foreign ones...that's it, no fine print, no complications.

advise taken. Just picked up an unlocked 900/1800/1900 phone and will order the virgin sim. The top up service for virgin is readily available throughout scotland?

Absotively posilutely

Inciddntally, I might have forgotten to mention and you might not be aware that you will pay nothing to receive calls on your virgin sim while in the UK; your callers will pay a surcharge over advertised to UK rates!

Vodafone just as easy to use?

Almost but...

1. The sim pack does not come with any credit. You have to purchase credit before you can use it.

2. Their prices to call North America are around £1/minute not 20p/minute.

Some claim vodafone coverage is better than virgin mobile in parts of the country; that I can't attest to. All I can say is I've never had trouble with Virgin.

If you are familiar with call back services such as callbackworld.com you can beat the high price vodafone charges to call North America.

Just to add, the top-ups are so readily available that it's so easy. You can top up at the check out of supermarkets or in most newsagents - even in the smallest village.
Shame I didn't read this sooner as I have a SIM-free Nokia sitting in the house doing nothing as when we upgraded last Christmas, it was cheaper to just receive a new phone and throw the old one away (it was at the end of it's one year contract so wasn't that old). In addition, I could keep the phone number, get half price monthly payments for 6 months and get a cash-back cheque for £50! The phone companies are actually paying you to use their network, such is the fierce competition here.

In Glasgow today when using a Royal Bank of Scotland ATM to draw cash I noticed the welcome screen told me I could top up my mobile using the ATM.

I don't have a clue how it does it but maybe that's another option for Steve, the original enquirer.

Thanks everyone for your help. One final question in regards to the sim card on l8shop.net

http://l8shop.net/Products/Virgin_Pa..._Sim_Card.aspx

Does this include the topup card or is it just the SIM?

The virgin mobile sim pack includes a top up card but it also comes with an initial value of £5 so the instant you step off the plane you will have a functioning British mobile phone. If you dial 789 you will hear a message telling you your balance (a very sweet voice will say, if you dial that while in North America, "hello and welcome to Virgin Mobile. We hope your trip is going well. Your air time balance is 5 pounds."

BTW Virgin mobile now allows roaming in the USA; not that you would ever want to make a call or receive a call in the USA (don't know about Canada) as the prices are asininely high but because of that, since Virgin requires at least one event every 180 days, I suppose you can send a text message to most anybody for at most 35p ato keep the number active and not have to buy another!