Mobile phone use in U.S.

[HmmmIwonder]

We'd like to use our phones in the U.S. while we're there for a few weeks, to make calls within the US for maybe booking restaurants, theatres, ringing up for information , but vodafone UK have no 'roaming' facility outside Europe. so texts and calls will be prohibitively expensive. Would it be an idea to buy a cheap PAYG phone there, has anyone done that, or are there complications we hadn't thought of in doing that?

I live in the US and bought a PAYG handset the day we moved here to use until I got an iPhone contract up and running,the handset cost $15 and I put $20 credit on for calls and texts which lasted about a month. This was from Best Buy Mobile which has branches everywhere, I did have to give an address when they activated my phone so not sure if you could use the hotels address?

You can get cheap mobiles there. A big brand is Tracfone. You can pick up a handset in pharmacies for $15.

Thanks guys. This might be a stupid question but could we take an old handset from here and just buy as payg sim card, do you know?

Yes, that's what I did, got one from ATT