TracFone is an
Analog Cellular reseller that sells service on a
prepaid basis, i.e. you purchase the
phone and a card that gives you a certain number of
minutes, and then you have to purchase an extra
card (sold at
convenience stores) every so often to add a specified number of minutes listed on the card. Even if you have plenty of minutes, your minutes will expire if you do not
purchase a card before the
expiration date in order to extend your service.
TracFone currently sells the Nokia 918 and 252C Analog Phones.
I seriously advise against purchasing phones and service from this company. When I purchased a phone and minutes from TracFone, I was told to input an excessively long string of numbers into my phone, and then wait 24 hours. Twenty four hours later, the phone didn't work, so I called their tech support, who proceeded to "reprogram" the phone, which involved entering another stream of digits, and then tell me to wait 24 more hours for the phone to be activated. Anyway the phone still didn't work two days later, so I called again and was told that the reason my phone didn't work was that the numbers that they had assigned me were already assigned to other customers and as such my phone was not being allowed onto the network! Apparently the software that TracFone is running doesn't consider "no numbers available to be assigned" to be an error condition worthy of a warning, and just goes ahead and displays to the rep a number which has already been assigned. Even after being told this, and being assigned another number, the phone still didn't work! Eventually the tech rep said that he would "call line management" and try to get some additional numbers in my area. It took me two weeks until my phone worked. Fortunately, one tech along the way added 30 minutes to my account because of all the trouble I had.
The moral of my sad story is this: Never order service from TracFone ever ever ever!