Virgin Mobile pre-paid cellphones for $7.11 at 711

Having fun with numbers! 711 is now having a new promotion, where they are offering their inventory of Virgin Mobile pre-paid cellular phones for exactly $7.11, plus sales tax where applicable. This is a great price!

A great use for Virgin Mobile pre-paid phones is if you want to get rid of your land-line but don't want to lose your phone number. So what you do is get a $7.11 cellphone, transfer the number to Virgin Mobile, and sign-up for the auto-topup plan that costs $15 every 3 months. So you end up paying $5 per month instead of over $20 per month with your local telephone operator. Plus you get the extra bonus of voice-mail, free long-distance and things like that.

But obviously this is only a good deal if you don't plan on using the phone too much. In other words, if you plan on spending $5 per month, which is about 30 minutes (depending on which plan you chose), then it's good!

In other words, this would be something like protecting your domain name, eg keeping your old landline number in case there are some people who still don't have your new(er) number.