We’ve decided to go ahead and keep the cheap Verizon phone we bought on vacation and just let the AT&T Pay As You Go account expire. The per minute charge is the same, so no loss there, but I did have to reenter the 70 odd contacts we had accumulated on the old phone into the new phone which took some time. At least with Verizon I could enter them offline in a CSV file and then import them in one fell swoop. Trust me, that was a huge time saver as it might have taken forever using the phone number pad.
My only real downside to the swap is I can’t find a way to get a free ringtone on the phone. With the prepaid plan you can’t add an attachment to a text message or email and you can’t use their Verizon Cloud or Backup Assistant Plus to load a media file to the phone. The only ones you can get are the ones for $3 in the Verizon store!
Though I do kind of wish I could get Big Papi’s voice back as the intro to the voice mail again (even if I could find the recording, I’m sure there would be no way to use it on the new service, if I can’t get anything but their approved ringtones on the phone.)