NEWS
13th December 2011
MAXROAM SIM card is PC Mag's Editors Choice for roaming
Maxroam lives up to its name. Cubic Telecom's roaming SIM card is inexpensive and flexible enough to make a good solution for anyone traveling to Europe. Although it charges high rates outside of Europe, it's the best card we've tested so far, making it our current Editors' Choice for a global roaming SIM card.
Background and Setup
Most American phones either don't work in Europe, or carriers charge insanely high roaming rates to do so. While the cheapest way to go when traveling is to purchase local SIMs to slot into an unlocked phone, there are plenty of reasons travelers might not be able to do so. We've been there. We've arrived in Spain on Sunday when the cell phone shops aren't open. We've gotten a SIM card in China all of whose instructions, and whose phone UI, was solely in Chinese. And we've spent too long with foreign salespeople with whom we don't share a language as we're unable to figure out how to get my smartphone set up for data.
Special roaming SIMs, designed to be slotted into inexpensive unlocked phones, help with that. You can order them before you leave, they work in multiple countries, and they have clear, English-language instructions, robust websites, and tech support.
Maxroam, a product from Cubic Telecom, is one of those SIMs. This one is designed primarily to be used in smartphones, although it works in any phone. We used two Maxroam SIMs on a trip to Germany and Poland, loading them into a Samsung Galaxy Z Android smartphone (borrowed from Nvidia) and a Nokia E6 (3 stars).
The Maxroam SIM comes in a convenient plastic holder with an instruction printout. Each SIM is sized for both regular and MicroSIM slots-just pop out the appropriately sized card. First you need to activate the SIM on Maxroam's website; then you can pop it into your phone. Your phone gets a U.K. number by default; you can get a local number from a few dozen other countries for prices starting at $8 per month.
Maxroam offers English-language support with toll free numbers in 36 countries. It's available 24 hours, but only Monday-Friday. There's also a well-designed 24-hour online portal where you can manage your account and add credit.
Performance
We found the Maxroam SIM easy to set up; we had both cards up and running, including data, within minutes. After adding a U.S. phone number to the card, caller ID showed up as the U.S. number, but we couldn't receive texts at that number-they had to be sent to the card's U.K. number. We also forwarded our own U.S. phones' calls to the SIM's U.S. number, and they came through just fine.
The SIM might even be a little too easy to use: We tore through data at a fearsome rate. Fortunately, Maxroam's website quotes data usage in real time, and you get warning messages on the phone when you're running low on credit. As this is a prepaid card, there's no "bill shock"-if you run out of the money you've loaded, you simply don't have service until you add some new juice.
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http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397507,00.asp >>
