Charlie: There are three main mobile phone companies serving Spain: Orange, Vodafone and Movistar. We have unlocked phones (more on that later) and just get Spanish SIMs for them. Previously we have gotten Vodafone: one month, 200 MS, 1.2 GB data, 100 minutes for 15 euros or about $17. We thought we found a better deal with Movistar, about the same thing for 12 euros plus international calling. The woman at the Movistar store has not heard of this even though it is on their website, a similar one had a 30 euro initial charge. At a second Movistar store they said they couldn’t sell it to us.
Back to Vodafone.
A long wait. We talked to a local guy who spoke excellent English. He told us some nice little towns to go see on the south coast and what wines to get.
15 euros even, no other charges. My google nexus 6 worked fine. Wynette has an LG G3 from T-mobile which we unlocked last year and used with a Spanish SIM with no trouble. This time it didn’t work, the phone seemed to be locked again. As far as we can tell, it relocked itself, not sure how. We went home and did a chat with t-mobile. I had to dredge up two old, almost forgotten PINs but we convinced them to re-un-lock it. I just got the email about, tomorrow when we are fresh.
One reason that I have a T-Mobile phone is that they have essentially free calling and unlimited data in 140 countries. Calls back to the USA are $0.20/minute and text messages are free. The unlimited data is a small amount of 4G, and then unlimited 2G (they try to upsell you to more 4G), but this is good enough for e-mail, even if not for posting a lot of photos. And wherever there is free wi-fi you can post photos — most hotels in Austria/Germany and Britain, where we travel frequently, offer free wi-fi, so we have never bothered to get a local SIM card.
That T-mobile plan you have really does sound like good for traveling. I’m not sure what our T-mobile plans provide but I don’t think they are good like that. (We have pretty minimal plans.) Charlie’s sister, Pat, will be here with us for two weeks. She’s going to use her Verizon plan, but it doesn’t sound as good as yours. Wynette