Renting a Cell Phone in the UK - any advice?
 

Any advice about where to go to rent a phone in the UK for a couple of weeks that does not have high per minute charges?

It's probably easier to buy a cheap pay-as-you-go phone, which you can find pretty much anywhere they sell phones and electronics.

Maybe look at the Orange website and see if you can find a store in a place that's convenient for you. I bought a payg phone at an Argos store for about 20 GBP.

In this day and age, you don't rent cell phones, especially in the UK. You buy an inexpensive unlocked gsm phone which at least has the frequencies of 900 and 1800 mhz. readilly available on ebay and then procure a pay as you go sim card from either T Mobile UK, Orange UK or Talk Mobile UK. Plenty of information is available on these in various threads here. You can pay as little as 3p/minute to call the USA and Canada and be able to receive calls for free.....

Renting a cell phone in this day and age is literally throwing money away, especially in the UK.

BTW there are ways of procuring T Mobile UK sim cards for nothing...conmplete instructions how to do so are available in one of the threads here as well as how to make calls to foreign landlines (and cell phones in Canada and the USA) for 3p/minute and calls within the UK for 15p/minute with recepton of all calls being free.

Look at ebay, or as stated about, buy a pay -as-you-go phone in UK,and buy and unlocked tri-ban phone. When you get to UK, stop at any store that sells phones and buy a chip for it. Just be sure to add time before you use it up.

you could check also www.callineurope.com to get your solution before your trip, they have good rates.

I'd probably ignore iloveeurope1's post. He registered today just to flog that website . . . . .

I was in London with the family for 10 days over the new year's holiday. We purchased cell phones (3) for 5 pounds each and added another 15 pounds in air time to all of them. I kept one and gave one to each of the teenagers and we were able to keep track of eveybody and make reservations and enquiries with money (time) left over. There are phone stores all over the place and I think the pay as you go option is the best option for short stays. So for $87.60 we had full communication and could have called home too, if needed.

Thanks for all of the input. I think when I arrive, I will be fairly close to an ASDA store and the mobile phone prices there look reasonable. What do you think?