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Basic cell phone question

I am a 74 year-old cell phone novice with an apparently basic question where i cannot get a clear answer. My wife has an apple phone and I have an android phone where we have a free international plan with no roaming charges. We will be in France later this year and will occasionally need to call each other while both of us are in France. Can i just call her by selecting her from my contact list. If not, what do i dial? Do i use a France or US country code? Is there an international access code involved?

Posted by
2600 posts

Can i just call her by selecting her from my contact list.

Yes.

You can check by going into your contact list, choose a contact > edit and look how the phone number is entered. It should show the country code already prepopulated ie + 1 for US.

Everything will work automatically as you choose a contact to call.

Posted by
33997 posts

if you don't replace the SIM (the little card that identifies your phone to the network, if you change it you also change your phone number) in a phone it is still registered with same number wherever you travel (that gets into data and phone plans you will perhaps investigate).

To call a US registered phone you need to dial the USA country code (also for Canada) which is 1. Then area code and number in the usual way. Different countries have different exit or international codes to tell the network you want an international number. On both the iPhone and you Android the phones have a feature which means you don't need to know that exit code, no matter where you are. Instead of putting in, say, 00 for international in some countries or 011 in others or other combos, you can just store the number in your contacts substituting a plus sign "+" and your country code and the phone works it out. So to dial her, you need to store her number in the form +16125551212.

You can use a number stored that way from anywhere in the world, and she can be anywhere too. Even standing right next to you. So you don't need to change anything back when you get home.

If you want to add a French number just enter +33 and the number.

I hope this helps....