cell phone single country calling home and local

Karen, if you don't want to pay a lot per minute to call home, you might want to consider calling using Skype or something similar. To do so without extra cost, you'll need to find a free wifi connection. You can take your iPhone and just set it so it connects only over wifi, not over a phone connection. (Well, I think you can do this. I'm familiar with Android phones, and they permit it.) To save on per minute calling costs, you can also purchase a telephone calling card at the European equivalent of a convenience store and call using payphones, which admittedly are a bit harder to find these days. To test a phone out beforehand, you'll need to either buy a used one off ebay (which requires a bit of knowledge and research) or buy an unlocked new one from a reputable seller (amazon and tigerdirect sell them). You'll still need to buy a SIM card from a European carrier. You can get those off ebay, but I'm not sure how reliable those are. If you get a foreign SIM, I recommend getting one from a U.K. cell phone carrier. That way, customer service and the prompts will be in English. Calling to the U.S. may cost less than $1 a minute, but it probably won't be by much. You can also get a phone and SIM from a travel phone company, but the cost is going to be more and may violate your desire to pay less than $1 a minute.

Karen, As Paul mentioned, it's sometimes a bit of a "gamble" when buying phones from E-Bay, but I always check the Seller's ratings and so far haven't had any problems. It's possible to find good quality unlocked phones (some relatively new) on E-Bay. I've used a Motorola V-551 for several years, and it's been a basic and reliable travel phone (I may be taking an iPhone this year). There are currently both new and used V-551 models listed on E-Bay. I'm not clear on why you you'll be buying two SIM cards for two trips? Using one SIM card works quite well, even if travelling in two countries. Each time you change SIM's, the number changes so that can be a bit confusing for people trying to call or send texts to you. Which countries are you visiting? Another option to consider is to buy an unlocked quad-band phone from E-Bay, and use it with a SIM card from one of the "travel phone" firms such as Roam Simple, Cellular Abroad, Call In Europe, Telestial or Mobal. The rates are consistent throughout western Europe (slightly higher for eastern Europe), and these use post-paid billing so it's not necessary to "top-up" and no worries about running out of minutes. The numbers are usually based in the U.K. so anyone calling you would have to dial long distance. The rates are typically about 49¢/min. for incoming, 69¢/min. for outgoing "in country", 89¢/min. outgoing to US or Canada, 69¢ for each sent text and received texts are FREE. These rates may differ slighly between firms, so you'll have to check their respective websites. Happy travels!