This video is going to be a little different than normal. Rather than reviewing a product like I usually do, I’ll be talking about my experience with a service, MintSim. Now before the folks over at MintSIM reached out and asked me to try their service, I really hadn’t heard of them at all. MintSIM is essentially a prepaid phone service similar to Cricket Wireless or MetroPCS, but rather than paying month to month, with MintSIM you save money buy purchasing longer plans. They have 3, 6 and 12 month options and generally speaking, the longer the plan the more you save, but they actually have a special right now where the 3 month plan is the same cost as the 12 month plan, so it’s a pretty solid deal if you just want to try it out rather than committing a full year.
Mint SIM (Official Website)
Also available on Amazon
I’ll obviously go more in depth with everything in a second, but as I was researching MintSIM before I started using the service, I honestly was met with some skepticism along with some interest. I pay a ton of money every month with AT&T, it’s a triple digit bill with not a lot of data and I’m not making payments on a phone or anything, so I’m paying just for the service and for the cost, I’m not getting a whole lot. However, AT&T here in Las Vegas provides good LTE coverage and I never drop a phone call, and with these prepaid services, I was sort of expecting to not have the best coverage, especially considering I’ve literally never heard of MintSIM before. However, between the cost and coverage, I was pleasantly surprised with how well MintSIM performed. I’ve been using the service for more than a week and a half now, and I’ll definitely put out an update after my first cycle of 3 months is up, but so far I wouldn’t be opposed to having MintSIM has my primary carrier
So when you first purchase a MintSIM plan, you’re sent out a new SIM card thats actually usable as a standard size, micro SIM and nano SIM, you just punch out what size you need. Now one of the immediate requirements for me to even consider something like this is I had to be able to use the phone I wanted, luckily my unlocked iPhone X is compatible, and you can use the IMEI checker on the MintSIM website to see if your device works, as long as it’s fully unlocked though no matter what device it is, it should work fine.
The pack of the MintSIM card has your unique activation code and you’ll use that on the website to activate the sim and set up your plan. It was all pretty straightforward, the first thing it asks is if you want to migrate your current phone number or set up a new one, and because I wanted to make some comparisons with my current ATT service, I just went ahead and set up a new number. Beyond that though, all you have to do is agree to the terms of service, setup billing and account information, and that’s it, setup is complete. You don’t have to call anyone or visit a store or any of that garbage, it was literally like a 2 minute totally instant process.
I went ahead and immediately swapped out my ATT SIM card with the new MINTSIM and I was like half expecting a delay in getting service honestly, but it right away connected with no issues as you can see up in the top left and also in the settings here on the device, and of course I got a whole bunch of welcome and informational texts that all breakdown some things you need to do to get some features enabled which I’ll talk about in just a minute.
But obviously the first thing I wanted to do was a speed test on LTE because that’s like 95% of what I consider to be important as far as carriers go. Now MintSIM is technically capped at 20mbps up and down, but you can see for whatever reason at least at home, I wasn’t even breaking 5mpbs down on AT&T while MintSIM had noticeably faster speeds across the board, and this was something that really surprised me. Obviously LTE speeds fluctuate all the time but no matter where I was, at least here in Las Vegas, the network MintSIM was on was consistent faster than AT&T. I never considered AT&T to be particularly bad in Las Vegas but I’m definitely sort of questioning that at this point.
The other important part in regards to carriers of course is call quality and reliability. Now I don’t personally talk on the phone really at all, but I know a lot of people do. So I have made quite a few phone calls in different areas with MintSIM to test things out, and I never experienced a drop call or quality issues. I obviously live in a very populated area and phone calls are never an issue anyway, but it was still nice to know that MintSIM was equally as reliable.
On the back end, MintSIM has a really straightforward dashboard that allows you to quickly check all the important stuff like what plan you’re currently paying for and how much data you have left, you can also easily add more data to your plan if you might go over your limit, you can purchase international roaming credit for phone calls out of the country, if you’re on certain android device you can set up Wifi talk and text, and of course you can also make adjustments to the current plan if you’d like to make any extensions or fall back to a month by month basis, and this all happens instantly right through the dashboard.
With any prepaid service, there’s going to be some limitations and that’s true with MintSIM. I already mentioned the 20mpbs data cap, but like I said I wasn’t even getting anywhere close to 20mpbs with ATT, so that’s something that just doesn’t even apply to me anyway. Something that is unfortunately though is the lack of visual voicemail support on iOS, and that one definitely hurts a little bit. You also need to manually configure APN settings to enable MMS features like picture messaging and group texts, which aside from a minor inconvenience when you’re first setting things up is generally not a big deal, the instructions are pretty straightforward.
So like I said at the start of the video, I’ve been using MintSIM for about the last week and a half which i feel is at least enough time to come to the conclusion that MintSIM is a really promising prepaid option. Cost-wise, MintSIM definitely has some of the most affordable plans even though you might be locked in for 3 months at a time. As far as coverage, I know results will vary here, but in my area LTE was very strong, cell service was reliable and a lot of the time for whatever reason, it was somehow better than what I was paying for with AT&T. I’ll be sure to update you guys at the end of my 3 month plan with a more in depth breakdown of how it all went, but at the moment I’m really pleased with MintSIM and I’m still surprised that I ended up liking it.
