can anyone give me some advice on the best deals in mobile phones
and for texting and ringing back home

cheers rickylufc

Depends where back home is? If it is outside Canada & the US it will cost a lot on a cell phone. Best deal is subjective, it all depends on how much you use it, when, to and from where, if you want roaming etc. To start with you may want to check out:

Bell, Telus, Virgin (Bell), Koodo (Telus), Rogers, Fido

Skype or phone cards from 7-11 are the best ways of calling the UK cheaply.

Agree with you there. We use both those and MSN too for free webcam chats

I would recommend Virgin Mobile. i use to be with Rogers and when my phone bill went to over $500 a month (it was for buisness and they did change my plan which caused the trouble) I changed to Virgin and got a blackberry.

I get free incoming calls, free calls between 9-5pm, 400 other time minutes and 200 long distance. I now pay $112.00 per month.

I also get text, email etc. i do not have internet search, but I know i wouldn't use it.

As someone else posted, all depends on how much and when you will use it. I dont use mine much - mainly for texting and short local calls. I do pay as you go with Fido, 20 bucks a month and get a 10% bonus. Unused credit rolls over so I generally have about 60 bucks in credit or so. No contract obviously. I'd be horrified if I was spending 112 a month

For long distance I used this service for a time and they were fine. Pretty much 2.5c minute anywhere and you can register the phone numbers you usually call from to avoid entering PINs etc.

Having typed this might I also suggest that the search engine is your friend, there must be endless threads on this already....

Because i use my phone for buisness and no other number plus i am on call most of the time, $112 is relatively cheap.

last month I spent just over 2000 minutes, which equate to about 5% of my time

We use our phones for business and it costs us $60 a month for two phones, unlimited local incoming and 800 minutes of long distance. I don't text!

For a business user the cost of the phone is not a big deal really, one lost transaction can be more than the cost of the phone for a year.

I totally agree,