What’s a Prepaid Phone? A Disposable Phone? A Marmot? We Can Explain 2 Out of The 3

Slang changes as frequently as diapers on a baby. One day you’re tossing it off with confidence, the next your friends are looking at you as a ghost for using words that are dead and buried. Luckily there are slang gurus around to help us avoid these pitfalls.

But when it comes to disposable phones, disposable numbers and prepaid phones: it’s easy to get tripped up between what means what. So, let us be your handy guide.

Prepaid Phones

As the name suggests, prepaid phones are paid for up front, meaning they are not attached to a contract with a phone provider. Traditionally these are physical phones that carry a certain number of minutes that someone can buy from a store.

As a reference point, prepaid phones were made popular from the HBO series The Wire. Check out our earlier post on that very topic.

Now here’s where the expressions get mixed up. Since these physical, prepaid phones have limited minutes, people would literally toss them when they ran out, and buy another. As a result, these prepaid phones are sometimes also called disposable phones.

Confused yet? Stick with us – we’ll iron out the expressions some more.

Disposable Phones

As we said, this expression is sometimes used interchangeably with prepaid phones. However, nowadays the expression has also evolved into “disposable phone number” because this describes phone numbers you can get on your smartphone through the Hushed Burner Number App.

Hushed gives you access to phone numbers separate from your real phone number and allows you to get rid of them whenever you want. Hence, people often refer to these “extra” phone numbers as disposable numbers.

But here’s the difference: with Hushed you’re not actually disposing of your physical phone as you would with a prepaid phone (that would be $$$$), but disposing of a phone number you’ve accessed through our phone app.

With us so far?

Ok. This leads to the next question.

Why Use a Disposable Phone Number?

One of the main reasons is simplicity. You no longer have to buy a physical, prepaid phone to have a disposable phone number. Instead, Hushed gives you a super easy way to tap into a disposable number from your smartphone.

And there are plenty of ways people are using them.

Some people like to have a disposable phone number as a layer of security between themselves and someone they might not know very well. For example, people might get a disposable number when they’re dating. In the event things don’t go well on a date, it’s easy to ditch a disposable number and cut off communication with that person.

Also, people might get disposable numbers to use as a buyer or seller on Craigslist or also when filling out online profiles, making sure that in each case they’ve kept their real phone number out of these transactions.

People are also using disposable numbers for business.

Hushed makes it easy to have as many numbers as you want at one time. So, some people find it useful to separate out different numbers for different people with whom they do business or even for different regions where they might be travelling on business. See our earlier post.

We hope we’ve helped clear up some confusion between prepaid phones and disposable phones. Now that things might be making more sense we encourage you to try out Hushed for yourself and see how it can come in handy in your life.

A marmot? Probably not as handy, but we’ll leave that between you and Google.