Cell phones
 

My husband and I will be in florence and rome for about 10 days next week. We will be getting cell phones. Would appreciate any help and information about Tim or Vodafone.
Anyone who has preferences....or what to get; rent,etc. our first time doing this.
Thanks for helping.

Are taking your current phones out of the question?

Our current phones will not work. Our carrier is verizon and the plan the offer is too expensive.

How much will you be using the phone? Mostly for calls and texts, or do you want to use data services?

depending on the phone, your Verizon phones might be made to work.
http://support.verizonwireless.com/s...e_roaming.html

Specifically, Item #11. If you have an iPhone 4S or newer, you can unlock it and then swap out the SIM card with one you purchase locally. That local SIM card will give you a local phone number, allow you to connect to an Italian mobile network, with local data/text/voice rates.

at the end of your trip, simply put your original SIM card back in your phone, and it will reconnect to the Verizon network.

Depending on your specific circumstances, this could be a great option. The downside is that, for the duration of your trip, you will give up your current mobile phone number in place of an Italian one, and calls back home could be difficult and maybe more expensive (be sure to check the rates, though). In return, you can make local calls and use the data service without fear of an outrageous bill when you get back.

Italy has a good new plan for tourists and short-term visitors, called TIM Welcome. It has a bundle of 200 minutes of calls, both to Italian numbers and to a large number of other countries. So calling home would be the same as calling locally. However, this plan probably wouldn't be cost-effective unless you were using data services.

That's why I wanted to know how much, and for what purposes, the phone would be used in Italy.

May call or text USA couple of times. Call each other if separated. May want to use for travel guide app if feasible.

Btw I have a samsung galaxie s3. My husband a bare bones LG

My husbands Galaxy 3S works in Europe. I can't remember if he had to have Verizon unlock it or not though. I do believe they did a deal that all LTE phones would be unlocked but I think the 3S fell in a bit of a gray area on that.