The Gun Counter

I need to get one of my daughters a phone. My company pays mine, so I don't have a plan at home.

My son has Virgin Mobile(?). $35/month, no contract, but I think his coverage is spotty - bad call quality with some frequency, but unlimited talk/text/data IIRC.

I have a drawer full of old phones that I might be able to reactivate. I have an old Motorola Droid X2 that I might be able to factory reset and talk to Verizon about a no-contract monthly plan.

Consumer Reports likes Consumer Cellular. Looks like it's geared toward the older crowd. Looks like $25/month gets you 500 minutes of calls, 500 texts and 50MB of data. Say $150 for a phone.

I'd like her to have texting so I can send her messages that she can get whenever. GPS/maps would be nice, but it's not critical.

Any advice on whom to look at or to avoid for cheap cell service that's fairly reliable? Any carrier tricks to look out for?

What Chris said. If T-Mobile has good coverage in your area and you're price sensitive then it's almost a no-brainer, you should be on T-Mobile. They have some extremely attractive prepaid plans (the one I'm on is 100 mins, unlim texts and data for $30/mo) and their postpaid plans (now with no contract or ETF) are a good deal too, especially for families.

Virgin is Sprint - they started as a Sprint MVNO but Sprint bought them now they're a Sprint prepaid brand. Sprint's network may be the worst of the big 4, especially for data.

fyi, AT&T has bought Cricket aka Leap Wireless (or is in the process of buying).