Her mother just brought a new hip home from the hospital. As we live across the street, my wife is on nurse-maid duty. She wanted to be reachable, so needed a basic phone for inbound calls only[1], and only for the next 2-3 months. So I got her the cheapest phone at Radio Shack. They called it a Shorty, but it looked just like the one you linked.

Then I got her a $20 pre-paid card. $0.30 / day, $0.10 / minute. If, after the first week or so, we find she's not using it every day we can switch to no daily fee, $0.25 / minute for the first 10 minutes each day, $0.10 / minute for the rest of the day. If she's about to run out of minutes, she'll get a text message telling her to top it off, which we can do online, on the phone, or at any store with the pre-paid cards. If she doesn't burn all the minutes in 90 days, we top off again for another $20.

I'm never buying a phone contract again.







[1] Yeah, I know, but she promised.