cell ohones

What you want to do, depends on how much you plan to use your phone. First, you need to make sure you have a quad-band phone. If you want to use your t-mobile service, you have to contact them and sign up for international roaming. They don't charge to sign up. You will then pay a per-minute charge when you use the service abroad. Their website posts the rates (most are about $1.29 a minute). You will need to get instructions on retrieving voice mail from their site (you pay the per minute roaming charge when you retrieve vmail). Their site also has instructions on how to make an international call. This works fine if you just plan to use your phone for emergencies and occasional quick calls, but will get extremely expensive if you plan to use your phone a lot. If you plan to make a lot of calls, it would be better to get a prepaid sim card from a shop in Ireland. You would need to get your phone unlocked. The shop where I bought my T-Mobile phone unlocked mine for me when I bought it.

I have a T-Mobile quad band razor phone. I bought it awhile ago specifically to take to Europe. If I use the T-Mobile service it's about $1-2 per minute in Ireland. Cell phones have yet to be my primary method of communicating. I've got a code to unlock the phone but, apparently, it doesn't work until you put a different sim card in.