Cell Phone Questions

The only reason I see that you might need to purchase a dual sim phone is so you could retain your AT&T number and also make use of a local number at the same time while you are here in the Philippines.. I believe your AT&T GSM phone will still receive calls and texts here in the Philippines, but depending on your US phone plan, it may be expensive to return these calls and texts to your homeland.  If you can do without calls and texts on your AT&T number while you are here, you can simply exchange your AT&T sim for a local Globe or Smart sim for your phone.   If you expect to communicate locally, you most definitely will need a Philippine sim card for your phone.  It would also be inconvenient to simply use data for 2 months and consider that your roaming AT&T data may be expensive as well !

Bob is correct. Get a local sim card, load more credit, buy data, you can talk to all via what's app etc using data, make local calls, give your friends in your country with access to international calls your number etc etc. PH. phone and data is cheap if you are a tourist button always reliable.

Cheers, Steve.

Globe has a booth in the Manila Airport right before you leave the building to get a cab.

Greetings mate.

From my experience there are a few things you have to consider.

1st. Will you be doing business with your current number? If yes then do not cut the line.

2nd. It's best to mainyain the the line for at least 3 months and do inform all your important contacts such as banks, family.. etc. You don't want to lose touch suddenly. It may get complicated as people can't get a hold of you.

3rd. Get a local SIM. Globe is not the best I can tell you this. Get the other one. I have tried them all. For postpaid SIM in philipines it's about 1200 peso monthly with the maximum broad band of 8GB. Which is a joke cos I have a line 200GB a month from Malaysia for the same price. You will need to make calls from time to time. And most of the locals use more sms than WhatsApp cos data ain't cheap for some to pay.

Hope this help.

Happy New year.

Make sure your phone is "unlocked", or it won't work with another simcard

Thanks for that. I am bringing an old phone that has been jail broken. Are TV stations  and cable TV all in Tagalog or Bisaya, or are there English language program?

Only local channels are in Tagalog. Most foreigners subscribe to a cable network, which will have international channels primarily in English

Cronus wrote:

Only local channels are in Tagalog. Most foreigners subscribe to a cable network, which will have international channels primarily in English

For 1,000 pesos/month Cignal has a cable which includes two basketball channels with at least 2 NBA games live every morning, plus a local channel which has had every NFL playoff game so far.  Other sports stations also has USA college basketball and had some bowl games.  Another channel has Young Sheldon and Big Bang Theory, current year, Friday and then several times during the week.  Plenty of news with CNN, Fox News, BBC and ABC News(☆Australian).  Plenty of other channels in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.