Originally Posted by
Consultette
Travel to the UK & Netherlands. Primarily looking for a usable phone with hotspot capability. I plan to tether my iPhone 5S off of the hotspot when needed. I do not want to be swapping out SIMs between phones since I want to keep my main # up and running the whole time I am abroad.
I don't care about call quality - no calls will be made from this phone. Primarily for data/texting. 3 month trip - so cost is an object since this will be a temp phone.
Would an unlocked mifi not work better for you? If you are just hitting UK and NL, I would just pick up a local sim in UK and another in NL. Then share prepaid data on the mifi. Since you'll be relatively stationary (not country hopping over very short durations) this should be fairly manageable. You can them keep your US sim in your phone and use a data based messaging platform to text (iMessage, whatsapp others)
Not to mention you'd likely get LTE speeds and data bundles on the order of GBs not MBs for a very low monthly rate