Asia - Bali: Local cellphones or SIM cards

Going back to Bali with Mr. Megatop in November, and this time a friend, ecaarch, is coming on his first visit to the Island of the Gods. In all likelihood, we'll be staying at different hotels, albeit both in the vicinity of Ubud.

So it occurred to me that a local cellphone would make communicating with one another easy. Just need to make short calls to discuss tour plans, dinner time, whose pool to use, whathaveyou.

What would flyertalkers recommend in this situation. A local cellphone? Rental or disposable? A local SIM card? How much does the hardware cost? And how much is it for a block of minutes? Finally, where is best to get this?

Wirelessly posted (Nokia N97 / Palm TX: Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.4; Series60/5.0 NokiaN97-3/10.2.012; Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1; en-us) AppleWebKit/525 (KHTML, like Gecko) WicKed/7.1.12344)

while cellpones in Indonesia are well priced, Im not sure Bali is the best city.... if your friend has an unlocked GSM, its best to buy a local SIM cars....

Me too will suggest your friend to just buy a local SIM prepaid card, its very cheap.
You can find more information here http://www.prepaidgsm.net/en/indonesia.html

Thanks for the pointers and link. Where would you suggest we buy the SIM cards? The airport? Ubud center? Is it relatively quick and painless? Reliable?

You can buy it at any supermarket, convenience store, or telephone kiosk everywhere. Just have them activate it for you and you're set to go.
Most people there use Telkomsel for the best network, or XL for the best price.

new sim card best,all over bali top up shops will install your new card ,friendly and easy range of prices and providers with pre paid minutes,$5-10us no worries mate

AFAIK, a sim card should cost about 20,000 rupiah ($2US) with 5,000 rupiah credit included.

The networks usually have ridiculously cheap rates quoted, but these are subject to conditions (off-peak, etc.), so you will pay probably $0.05/minute in reality.

So long as you've got an unlocked GSM phone handy then it's easy to buy a SIM card locally and then just add some credits to it. I'd recommend going with Telkomsel SIMpati for the best coverage - once you're out of the main population areas it's the network that will give you the best signal (though as others have noted, it does come with the highest per minute pricing too, but still not too bad - especially if you're calling SIMpati to SIMpati).

The only other thing is you might want a local to help you with activating the SIM as well - it's not too difficult, but given the prompts on the phone are generally in Indonesian and the English language instructions are a bit scant with the SIM's it can save you a little frustration if your Bahasa Indonesia isn't so strong. :D

Thanks for the tips. My Bahasa Indonesia starts and stops with "Selamat Datang." So I'll need the vendor to get us set up and will want to test the two phones to make sure one can call the other before we leave the shop.