I usually pay $10/day so my cell phone works like at home.
I hear service is spotty on the French side. Has anyone tried Verizon there?

We stayed in the Hope Estate area from April 28 through May 6 and had no issues with our Verizon service. Utilized the same $10/day service you mentioned. Phone service and receipt and sending of e-mails work fine on both sides of the island.

We also have Verizon and utilize the $10 per day service when on the island. Didn't have any problems on either side using phone service &/or internet data.

Seems pretty expensive if you actually use it every day, unless your work is paying for it or something. For someone who still wants to rent a phone on island, Craig from Packlight still rents phones.

We prefer to carry one of our own cell phones, but don't necessarily use it every day. We used to rent from Sharon, but find this much more convenient with all of our own apps on it.

We don't routinely carry a smart phone at home, as we both spend all day in front of a computer, so never got into using the phone for everything, like most people.

Haha, Ed would agree with you, as I am much more of a geek than he is when it comes to using phone apps and such. He doesn't use his smart phone nearly as much as I do, after being on the computer all day. Though he didn't complain when I had us all checked in with Mobile Passport upon our arrival back at JFK, where we breezed through immigration and customs. So sometimes my geekiness pays off.

Oh, it definitely comes in handy from time to time, I'm sure!

I believe they also offer a $40 monthly plan which could be more cost effective.

We rely on our smartphone when travelling. Maps are great. You can download them so you don't need a connection, but it really helps to be connected to look up locations and such. We used the Verizon $10 a day plan in Curacao and ended up using 4 days of the 7 we were there, though it would have been 3 if I had not forgotten to turn the phone off. The resort WiFi was iffy and I needed to do some work and did use it for that.

The $40 a month plan is awful! We used that in Europe a few years ago before they added the $10 a day plan. You get 100MB of data and then pay $25 for each 100MB over that. We were not heavy users there, but still ended up with $50 in overages. And you have to turn the plan on before a trip and turn it off after a trip unless you travel regularly and want to pay $40 every month and you have to be careful that it is on for a month or they may prorate your data allowance and minutes and if your trip straddles the month ending you can end up with two months worth.

We used it this last May. Good deal as we were there for 3 weeks.