This month, I'll be finally merging my wife's and my finances together. One credit card, one bank account, etc. The tricky decision looks to be the cel phone. She's currently got a TDMA Nokia 3000-series phone that's ready to die, serviced by Cingular, who's at some point going to drop TDMA service. I've got a snazzier Nokia 5100 (world GSM) with T-Mobile. I use loads of minutes, she uses relatively few.

My temptation is to stick with T-Mobile, but the prices for two phone "family" plans are essentially the same. At T-Mobile, $70/month gets you two phones serviced with 850 minutes plus unlimited nights, weekends, and mobile-to-mobile. At Cingular, it's $60/month for the service, plus $10 for the second phone -- no difference. Both are GSM.

Now that Cingular and AT&T Wireless have merged, making Cingular the top-dog of U.S. cellular service, presumably they'll have good GSM coverage, at least once they finish doing all of their integration. On the other hand, I've never been unhappy with my T-Mobile service, plus I have a grandfathered international roaming rate that varies by country, but is generally much cheaper than the flat $1/minute rates they offer customers today.

Presumably, I can play "customer retention" games with either company to make them cough up a decent phone to replace my wife's old Nokia. Since our next car is likely to have Bluetooth, I want to get that on the new phone. Since a clam-shell seems to be the right answer for my wife, I'm leaning toward a Motorola V600 (T-Mobile) or V551 (Cingular). Both are quad-band phones with all the bells and whistles. Anyone with personal experience with either phone here? Any other thoughts on how I might handle the cel phone merger?

I don't know exactly what "relatively few" means, but I use almost no minutes and it's way cheaper for me to do prepaid (via Virgin) than to use any other plan. $0.25 per minute sounds like a lot until you realize that that is the only fee you have to pay. (411, international calls and so on cost extra, but there are no in-US roaming charges.) And there is no expiration for minutes. Their only requirement is that I pay them at least $20 every three months, and that's often about what I do. Even if you are forced to pay more money when you don't need to, you still get the full benefit of that money, so just start using it a little more.

Of course, to you "relatively few" probably means ten times what I use, so this may all be irrelevant. And none of their phones are terribly fancy. But it's a great deal for the wife and me.

Yeah, "relatively few", in this case, probably means 20-60 minutes per month. My own usage regularly goes to 500 or more. Right now, we've both got $40/month accounts (her's being decidedly under-utilized). I'm looking at a $70/month "family" account as being roughly equivalent to a $60/month "more minutes" individual account plus $10/month for the extra phone line. From that perspective, it's a reasonable deal.

Well, I know this seems more like option C, but since you didn't specifically say "no CDMA," I'll assume it's not out of the question.

I have Sprint and I'm happy with it. I have the Fair & Flexible plan which they've been hawking recently, and it's really a good plan. It also fits your needs.

For $70 the two of you have 800 minutes (use 'em or lose 'em minutes). That basically gives you, according to your numbers, 740 to 750 minutes a month. The great part of the plan is that if you go over, you basically get a charge of $5 that gives you another 100 minutes. If you go over than, another $5. And so on.

The downside is bluetooth. They decided not to go with the SE T608, but it's still available. I bought one and I love it despite a few faults. The only other current handset with bluetooth is the Motorola V710, which I think is a little more than you want to spend

Anyway, I thought I'd put in my two cents.

I'm in Europe on business typically once or twice a year, so I prefer the idea of GSM. The Motorola 710, with Bluetooth, would be attractive, but all the Verizon people who have them are complaining that Verizon neutered several of the phone's features to force you to spend money to use the cel network to transfer data.

Yeah, it's definitely true that these companies are limiting what you can do with bluetooth. I suppose I'm glad that Sprint didn't go with the T608 after all. I'm able to use it as a wireless modem, and I think they're stopping that.

Oh well, it was an idea. I will say that when I took my TMobile phone to Europe they charged me an arm and a leg, even though I enabled their international thing.

Don't forget you can usually set "Call Redirect" on your main US number associated with your old SIM, and point it at the new Euro number associated with the new SIM. That way all calls and messages will still arrive without you having to faff back and forward between SIMs.

But that would be expensive, which is part of what he was trying to avoid, I imagine.

Indeed. My grandfathered TMobile plan tends to give me airtime rates of under $0.20/minute while in western Europe as long as I'm receiving and not originating a call. This means I can SMS home to say "call me back". TMobile's current plan is $1/minute and Cingular is $1.20. My grandfathered plan is cheap enough that it's a significant reason to stick with TMobile. I haven't priced out pre-paid cards lately, but I think my air rates are comparable.

I do have an unlocked phone. But it's like Dan said, the rate I was getting was about $1 per minute. That's not good. Not good at all. There wasn't much point in getting a SIM for the region I was going to be in, particularly when you're in a different place every 3 to 7 days.