Tracfone Camera Phone, LG CG225: Product Review

The Tracfone Camera Phone package bills Tracfone as "America's #1 Prepaid Cell Phone" and checks off four selling points: No Contracts, No Bills, No Surprises, and You're In Control. Other than the first claim, the other four statements are absolutely true. Other promises made are "Same low rate for local, long distance, roaming and International calling", "no daily or monthly fees", and "easy to buy and add airtime". Tracfone was one of the first cellular phone services to provide "no contract" service. The Tracfone Camera Phone is a new offering.

The phone is manufactured by LG Electronics, model number CG225. The black flip top or clamshell design phone weighs 3.27 ounces and utilizes a VGA camera. The Tracfone Camera Phone has all the standard features expected of cell phones, such as address book, selection of ringtones and wallpaper to choose from to customize your phone. The first surprise after charging the battery is the camera can be used even before activating the phone. You can snap a photo and truly personalize your screen wallpaper before you make your first call. The lip of the plastic packaging has a thin strip along three sides, making clipping and removal of the phone and accessories easy to do.

The packaging is written all in English with a small notice "En Su Idioma" with three icons and the Spanish words ensuring service is available in the Spanish language. The TracFone guide, LG User Guide, Data Services Quick Guide and Terms and Conditions are written in both English and Spanish. Rather than put information side by side, the booklets are flipped, making for continuous reading of instructions in your preferred language. There are a lot of pictures that make following set up instructions a breeze. The only minus of the Tracfone Camera Phone is the little plastic strip that covers the battery charging pins. It is not attached to the cell phone and was harder to put back into place than removing it. Battery life lasts between 6 to 8 hours without recharging and has 8 to 10 days standby time.

There are two ways to activate your Tracfone Camera Phone. You can call an 800 number from a landline phone, which involves typing code with your cell phone keypad. The faster and easier way is to visit the Tracfone website online. If you spend a lot of time talking on a cellular phone, prepaid phone service may not be for you. If you want a cell phone for emergency or other short calls, it is like having an ever ready phone booth in your pocket. This Tracfone comes with free voice mail, caller ID and call waiting. Because there is no standard monthly fee for Tracfone service you choose how much you want to spend in any given month.

The Tracfone Camera Phone is offered online at TracFone's website for $79.99. The cost to purchase double minutes for life is free with purchase of this phone. A 30 minute airtime card will give you 30 days and 30 minutes of talk time and retails for $9.99. This means calls cost 33 cents per minute. With double minutes the cost is reduced to 16 cents per minute. Purchasing a 200 minute card for $39.99 will give you 6 months of talk time, costing 9 cents a minute for this phone. Any unused minutes are carried over from month to month. Thus an initial purchase cost of about $120. will give you a guaranteed 6 months of service with 410 minutes of talk time. All Tracfones come with 10 minutes talk time. If you activate your phone online you will also get a bonus 0f 20 minutes free time. If you register with Tracfone, they will email you offers throughout the year making it easy to keep your phone active for 9 cents a minute talk time.

As a comparison, Verizon Wireless prepay plans charge a daily access fee of 99 cents which means you will be paying $27.90 a month without even a minute of talk time. This makes TracFone prepaid service the more cost effective of the two plans. I highly recommend the Tracfone Camera Phone for anyone who does not want to be bothered with credit checks or to obligate themselves to a year or more of service at a fixed monthly service fee. If you do a lot of text or picture messaging you might be eating up too many of your talk time minutes depending upon the speed of web connection from your location. My rating for this Tracfone Camera Phone is 4.5 Stars.