International travel ... cell phone options?

[sigtauenus]

I have some international travel coming up, namely Morocco, Japan, and Afghanistan. My cell is a HTC Evo with Sprint which is not international, and with international data rates, I wouldn't want it to be.

I'm looking for a no-frills pre-paid option that will work in the above three countries, voice and text is all I want.

What are my options? I have seen some stuff on Google that I'm not familiar with, and since it does me no good to call customer service from the middle of Morocco to complain about the phone not working, I'd rather see some proven options.

 

[B67FSTB]

I am guessing , take an older cellphone with you and buy a prepaid sim card in each country.

One off those old cellphones that only / still works on 900 Mhz. ???

My guess , but I have no experience with it.

Marocco should give you no problems.Japan probably also not but Afghanistan , I don't know !!

 

[opentrackerSteve]

My son just returned from his sophomore year in Italy and here's what worked for him (he also had visited England, Turkey, France and Germany).

1. He has an iphone and he forwarded his calls to our land line. (we had several of his friends call him as they had forgotten he had moved to Italy)

2. He got the world traveler package which put many countries rates at $0.99 per minute (except Turkey!)

3. Skype is your friend. We communicated with him almost exclusively using skype.

4. He got a local cheapo phone with sim and loaded $ on it to make local calls.

I don't know if your EVO will connect to wifi but if it does and you can load SKYPE that will help you immensely.

 

[sigtauenus]

The Evo doesn't have a sim card, so my wife just got an old blackberry back from her mom that we had given her a year or two ago. Japan requires 3G, but I won't be there more than a week at a time which I can either suck up and not call home or just use a calling card. Shouldn't be a problem getting a local SIM card for either Morocco or A-stan.