No Contract Cell Phones - A Blessing or a Curse?

If you are unhappy with your cell phone provider and all the fine-print details of those two year contracts, then no contract cell phones may be just what you are looking for. Of course, you have to be willing to take the bad points with the good.

What are No Contract Cell Phones?
A no-contract cell phone is exactly what it sounds like; a cell phone that does not require you to sign your life away on one of those two-year contracts where minute usage and terms and agreements are all blended together into pages long documents that you need have a legal degree in order to be able to translate them.
How do they work? Quite simply actually, you go to a store that carries no-contract cell phones (also known as pre-paid cell phones), buy a phone with a set number of minutes already loaded onto it, then use it just like any other cell phone. When you are ready for more minutes you go to the website specified, and use your credit or debit card (or PayPal account) to download more minutes onto your phone. It’s that simple.

The Upside of these Cell Phones
There are lots of good things about no-contract cell phones; this includes the price (you can buy them for as little as $20 at some stores) not having to worry about monthly bills; not having to worry about going over your allotted minutes (when the minutes are used up – they’re used up, there’s no way to go ‘over your limit.’ This is a great feature if you have chatty teenagers!).
But no-contract phones are also worry free. If you lose your cell phone or it gets stolen, you don’t have to worry about anyone racking up huge charges on your phone. You’ve lost the phone, and whatever minutes are on it, but it’s not usually a huge loss. They are also hard to trace. Don’t get me wrong, they are just as easy to ‘listen in on’ as any other cell phone (if someone has the right equipment), but if you don’t register your cell phone on the online website provided, no one knows who bought that particular cell phone and any calls made from it can’t be traced back to you. Makes you want to go out and become a secret agent, doesn’t it? Though I don’t think I’ve ever seen James Bond use a pre-paid cell phone.

On the Other Hand
It’s not all roses and moonbeams however. No contract cell phones also have their downsides. First off, since most pre-paid cell phones don’t use one particular cell phone network, and since they use whatever network is available, the rates per minute may sometimes be higher than on contract phones.
Another downside of these phones is that once your minutes are up, they’re up. It doesn’t matter if you’re chatting with a friend or in the middle of an emergency phone call, your phone will go dead and you’ll have to get to a computer in order to load more minutes onto it.
And then of course, there’s the phone itself. Most no-contract phones are about as unsexy as a bathrobe. You may be able to purchase a pre-paid phone with the ability to take pictures or connect to the internet, but chances are it’s not going to have nearly the amount of features that you’ll find on the higher-end phones available through the big-name companies.

So, What Will it Be?
In the end it all comes down to preferences. Do you want the security that comes with a cell-phone on a contract, or the freedom that comes with a no-contract cell phones? The choice, of course, is yours.