Unlocked Nokia tri-band ready for SIM- United Mobile,TravelSim or other. Which would you suggest for France and Germany? Many thanks.

After reading of the cost of buying a SIM in FRance, I purchased a SIM from Call In Europe.
I understand that a SIM purchased in France would cost over .80 per minute.
The Call in Europe fee is ,39 per minute but remember you will have a $41 investment just to purchase the SIM and the postage.
I believe the UNited MObile cost per minute is much higher.
I do not know about Germany.
You may also buy a local SIM and sign up for a call back service, which I decided to forego for this trip as I also have a land line that I can use which I haven't had lately.
Hope this helps

www.solomo.de

Have it sent to your hotel in Germany or France. 9ct/min to US from Germany. Incoming in France 10ct, in Ger. free.
Standard german mobile phone number.

Buy it for 20€ incl. 10€ worth of calls and be happy . Recharge via credit card possible. Company has been very reliable so far (last 2 years).

Cheap data in Germany, 24ct/megabyte.

Only problem with this carrier is that unlike most of the larger companies, it is impossible to set the voice prompts and voicemail menu to English which I can with vodafone DE...could be a small or large problem figuring out how to do simple things!

It depends, of course, on time and effort and itinerary what might be best.

For example, if you're starting in the UK, a direction to consider going is with T Mobile UK...sim cards are available for free via the web to be sent to your hotel..it comes with no value on it at all but it comes with a swipe card that easily allows you to go into any chain chemist (pharmacy) or just about any chain grocery and "top up" (add funds).

The nice thing...local (UK) rates are fairly cheap and with a tie in with a firm called yourcallworld, you can make calls all over the world for 3p/minute (3p is about the equivalent of 6¢ US)..somewhat more expensive to call mobile phones outside the USA and Canada which operate differently (receiver in the USA and Canada pay air time while in most of the rest of the world caller pays the whole bit) so a call to an American or Canadian mobile is not differentiated from a call to an American or Canadian landline.

T Mobile UK also adheres to the European tariffs that is one of the good things the eu has done for its citizens. So once you leave the UK, while in the eu, you can receive calls at 19p/minute and make calls within the eu at 24p/minute...that is scheduled to come down as long as the eu continued to stand up to the large telcoms such as Vodafone.

Thus if starting in the UK with a trip to France, probably your best bet might be simply to use the T Mobile UK sim card for the entire trip.

You are quite right, French sim cards are asininely expensive and the two companies I have seen which bill you by the call, do give you free reception in France but calls to other countries are very high.

United Mobile in many respects is the best of all worlds although not dirt cheap but not terribly expensive either because you get the free receiving of calls throughout almost all of Europe and calling to North America or Australia is higher than 3p/minute but nowhere near as high as some companies such as Vodafone UK charge to call North America from the UK...and again as noted calls to North American mobiles are not surcharged (calls to Australian mobiles would be).

United Mobile has proven to me to be very very reliable especially for receiving calls throughout much of the civilized world for free. Reception on received calls is generally excellent as you are using the roaming facilities of a local carrier. Also you get a number with a +44 country code which are billed as UK numbers (even though your number is not in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland but rather one of the channel Islands) so calls to you are not that expensive.

And the nice thing about UM (as well as T Mobile UK) unlike the French thieves is the sim cards can remain active indefinitely with very little effort on your part or very little cost either. Officially UM cards expire after a year of non use....simply every 9 or 10 months send a text message anywhere...30 or 40 cents and you have another year....T Mobile UK cards expire in 6 months of non use so the same thing would hold and you retain your number.

With the French cards, you top up with a certain amount of call credit and a certain small amount of time of validity..for example a top of €10 will buy you €10 worth of calls but only 15 days of validity after which they steal your credit...you can keep your number for an additional 6 months during which time you can still receive calls in France but after that the sim card is cooked unless topped up and topping up isn't easy...they won't take a non French card to top up on the web...you need to buy top up vouchers before leaving France and throw away say €10 before the 6 months are up to retain your number. This is an area the eu can help in and stop this thievery.

I agree w/ the T Mobile UK SIM

We bought one for our UK trip in Feb and recharged it for our trip to France - English prompts, relatively inexpensive calls as above, and since we mostly use a cell phone for local calls in the country we're in, it was cheap and no hassle.

If oyu call the US a lot your charges may vary some but to me it was worth it to have the prompts in Englsih, and since i use T Mobile at home the interface was familiar.

Do yourself a favour and buy a german SIM.

Also, smobil.com* offers SIMs for €15 with €10 airtime that allow you to call another smobil subscriber for 1¢ per minute - in Germany only. From time to time, they offer these SIMs at 2/€15, sometimes 1/€10. This is great for keeping a party of travelers in touch.

They're sold through Schlecker stores, of which there is one on every corner in Germany.

* (Turn down your sound.)

Last year I ordered a United Mobile card and it did not arrive in time for our trip. In Germany we bought one of the smobil cards at Schleckers and thought it did not work. It took a couple of days and started working. We went to Prague and I made one short call to the hotel and we were out of time on our card--tried several places in CR to add time, etc.but never worked it out. The signal came back when we got back into Germany but we needed to add time and managed to buy the wrong thing. We just were not savvy enough to deal with it and everything was written in and spoken in German and we couldn't understand that either.
So, hoping to have a UM or some other card before we leave home and give it a try and hope for better things.

Thanks so much to all for your thoughts and suggestions. Would like to hear more from others as well.