Nice simple phone and this review covers NET10 as well

Author's Rating:

Pros: Phone: no-frills - works great - small -good volume.
NET10: cheap, good signal, good service

Cons: Phone: No fancy features, no text from internet
NET10: None non-heavy cell-phone users

The Bottom Line: 
Phone: No-frills, excellent quality bar style, small, nice shape.
NET10: Great for people who don't need a ton of minutes.  Cheap and minutes roll over.

Author's Review
I discuss both the C155 phone and NET10 service since we started the two together after doing much research on prepaid phone services.

My husband and I used to be with Verizon. No complaints there, but we got sick of paying $44 a month for 400 minutes that we really didn't need. We don't use cell phones nearly as much as other people. Also, we needed two cell phones and didn't want to pay even more every single month.

First, about the phone. We both like this phone very much. Since it is an outdated phone, we bought them on eBay rather than through stores. We were able to find new ones still in the package twice. They are offered either for the Net10 service or Tracfone. If you buy it for one, you cannot transfer the phone to the other service; so be sure you are buying a C155 that is specifically for the phone service you want. They aren't on eBay very often for NET10, so just be patient and keep looking. (Also, there are several other phones for NET10.)

If you want bells and whistles, don't buy this phone. It is very simple. It is just a phone, without a camera and some of the other hip features popular today. Quite honestly, we like it because of its shape, its small size, good volume, and that it is a bar style phone. We tried other bar phones, but some of them have very poor speaker volume. We could hard hear each other.

I don't know if it is the phone or because the cell service we use won't offer it, but I don't like the fact that we cannot receive a text message from an internet website. I use an internet-based fax service where I can program it to send a message to my cell phone when I receive a fax. However, my phone can't receive them. It can only receive text messages sent from other cell phones. So, if you have a friend that sends text messages to you from the internet, it won't work.

One thing I don't like is the number of bars displaying the remaining battery time - not enough bars. When it gets down to one bar, it really doesn't have much time left. I would feel better with more bars so the battery time left is spread out better for gauging the time left.

It is very slippery to hold, but I found a case for only about $9 at walmart that fit it. We just carefully cut out some of the plastic that was covering up the face and it works great.

Now, about NET10. We tried another service first, but the signal strength in our area was very poor. We found out that in some areas NET10 uses Cingular One (now AT&T) and that particular company has good signal strength in all the areas that we frequent.

We heard that NET10 has terrible customer service. We have not found that to be true, so perhaps over the years they have improved. I've had to call them a few times with questions or to activate a different phone, and they have been easy to understand and helpful. I believe they outsource in South America rather than India. Nothing against India, but the South Americans seem to have a better comprehension of the English language, in my experience. (Wish all American companies would use Americans, but that's another story.)

In case you aren't familiar with NET10, their rate per minute is alway 10 cents per minute. Text messaging is 5 cents.

I like the way you don't have to call in and buy minutes on a credit card. We just go to the store (Walmart, for one) and buy minutes on a plastic card. We scrape off the film on the back and uncover the numbers we have to use. We then go into the prepaid section of the phone menu and enter those numbers in the "redeem airtime" section. Within a few seconds to a few minutes, the new minutes appears on the face of our phone with the new expiration date. The unused minutes always roll over unless you procrastinate and don't buy a card to add minutes before the expiration date, which is every 60 days. So, what this means is that the services costs a minimum of $30 every 60 days ($15/mo, of course). You can buy cards with more minutes and longer expiration times if you wish. If I divide everything in two in order to relate it to a per-month deal, I think that $15 a month is very reasonable for 150 minutes a month. Even if you use more minutes, just multiple the average number of minutes you use a month times 10 and you'll know whether this is a better deal or not compared with your monthly service.

So, instead of paying $44 a month for one phone, 400 minutes (no rollover), we are paying $30 a month for two phones and 300 minutes, total, with rollover. That is all we need, so we love NET10.

Hope this review was helpful.