cellphone: no data plan on Orange SIM card?

We're looking at moving to Poland for a year and I want to get cellphones for us. It sounds like the best thing to do is buy the phones and the SIM cards in the U.S., but the Orange sim card doesn't have a data plan, nor does it work outside of Poland.

Anybody have any advice on a strategy? Can we buy them in the states and expect stuff to work, or should we try to buy them when we get to Poland? We'd like to be able to use them while travelling around the rest of Europe as well.

I wouldn't buy phones in the US. The phones you get in PL might actually be more state-of-the-art (I don't know about the relative prices though). I would also definitely just buy pay-as-you-go SIM cards without getting tied up in the hassle of contracts and tariffs. You can use your pay as you go phone anywhere in Europe - I certainly did. You might need to activate a roaming feature and maybe pay more though.

I always buy local prepaid SIM once I come to different country. My phone is not locked to particular provider so it accept any SIM card. It turns out to be much cheaper than any roaming.

For incoming calls I use SkypeIn and call forwarding to foreign number.

PS: Don't forget that US use 850 and 1900 MHz bands for GSM, while Europe/Asia uses 900 and 1800. Be sure that your phone support 900/1800 MHz bands before taking it to EU.

That's true, probably the best solution possible :-)

Oooh, yeah, SkypeIn with call forwarding sounds like a great idea, thanks!

But do the local SIM cards come with data? The Orange one apparently does not. No point in getting smart phones if there's no access to the Internet, I think. We might as well just get stupid phones.

orange.pl/portal/map/map/internet_free_pre_discover

I used to access the internet on my "stupid" mobile years ago in Poland, so things wouldn't hopefully have gotten worse since then ;-)

I know the link above is in Polish, but Google has a "translate this page" option somewhere and this would probably be good enough to check out the info.