Cell phone purchase in Italy

sharon,

You might want to contact Verizon for information on their international roaming/rental options. Have a look at This for all the details.

You could also purchase or rent a phone from one of the "travel phone" suppliers such as Cellular Abroad, Call In Europe, Roam Simple, Mobal or Telestial. Be sure to check their rates so that you have a clear idea on what your costs will be.

Happy travels!

sharon,
The big players in Italy are TIM, Wind, and Vodaphone. They will sell you a phone for about 39 euro complete with SIM.

I used my Verizon Z6c worldwide edition phone this past July and August. I called Verizon and they sent me a free sim card from Vodaphone. The phone took 5 days to interface with the Italian phone system, but I could send text messages immediately. I also bought their $4.99 per month package so the incoming and outgoing calls cost 99 cents per minute. I canceled this package as soon as I returned home. The text messages were around 50 cents each. Next year when I go again I am going to buy an unlocked gsm quad band phone from Ebay and then buy a sim card from an Italian phone store after I arrive.

Buon viaggio,

RB

In 2007 we finally purchased a cell phone in Italy from Vodaphone. Can't remember what the price was. Just used it on a July trip to Italy. Had to purchase a new SIM card for 30 Euros and calls were .16 Euro within Italy, .50 Euro to the states and ALL incoming calls free.

Interesting about the Verizon Z6c problem noted above. I have the same phone and had zero issues using it in Great Britain and France last year. The one note I might add is that there is a "global" setting on the phone to force the phone to pick up either CDMA (in the US) or GSM (Europe) frequencies. I did have it on the global setting, which did not immediately pick up GSM frequencies. I toggled the setting to "GSM" and with a quick on/off of the phone, 'Bob's your uncle".

I toggled the setting to "GSM" and with a quick on/off of the phone, 'Bob's your uncle".

Sage advice for any mobile (cell) phone owner.

In the past I've worked programming mobile phone software and one thing I think a lot of people don't really think about is that they're basically just small computers (in fact any mid range phone these days is probably more powerful than my first 4 or 5 home computers combined!)

Even though they are designed for long periods of up-time I'd say 90% of issues with the average phone can be solved with the old on/off reboot. (Especially anything involving the network as a lot of the RF stuff gets initialised at boot up.)

On the same subject I'd say a fair chunk on the remaining 10% of problems is due to the memory being full.

Memory of the phone or memory of the user?

Thanks. ; )