Vodafone (UK) are awesome within Europe - when I am abroad I pay £2.50/day to use my normal price plan abroad (so I still get unlimited minutes/texts, and 6GB data, for no cost other than that daily fee). For calling European numbers they aren't quite as good, but for £5/month the prices drop from £1/min to between 5p and 20p/min depending on the type of number I'm calling.
Outside Europe they're still awful though, something like £1.50/min to call to America/Asia from UK, and same for both placing and receiving calls when in those continents.
Last time I was in America I picked up a cheap phone at a supermarket that gave me 1c/min phonecalls to anywhere in the US or even abroad - including calling UK mobile phones. That saved me a lot of money.
Think the trick to overseas is to get a local pre-paid SIM card, and use that number locally. As pre-paid SIM cards are getting more pervasive around the world, normally this works out as the cheapest option. Naturally, there are some countries where purchasing a pre-paid SIM is near impossible, or costly enough that sticking to roaming with your current provider works out cheaper.
Agreed, that's essentially what I was doing in the US, I just got it with a cheap phone too so I could keep my normal blackberry up and running with my UK number.
But stuff like the Vodafone deal within Europe are awesome, as it saves the hassle of needing either two phones or sim swapping.
I do the same. Cheap phone for local calls, and my normal phone for calls to/from home. What frustrates me is that even though dual-SIM phones have been around for years, no Western service provider will sell them, so none of the more popular smart phones support it.
Check out EE roaming; it's competitive with Vodafone (one of the reasons I moved to them). £5/month for unlimited roaming minutes/texts in EU, US and others. Data is reasonable value @ £25/GB and lasts a month. Importantly includes places like the US, Australia, Russia, China, India etc ....
Three got a little bit better - no roaming charges whatsoever in a number of European countries (i.e. no data cap on my plan). It was really handy to not have to worry about loading google maps and local websites while out and about in Italy this summer. Hopefully the list of countries will keep increasing.
Three actually recently announced a similar thing to this, whereby you take your contract with you to any country that Three operates in, i.e. Australia, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, Hong Kong and the Republic of Ireland. Other European countries and you still have to pay their standard European roaming charge...
Outside Europe they're still awful though, something like £1.50/min to call to America/Asia from UK, and same for both placing and receiving calls when in those continents.
Last time I was in America I picked up a cheap phone at a supermarket that gave me 1c/min phonecalls to anywhere in the US or even abroad - including calling UK mobile phones. That saved me a lot of money.