Paul Schlyter wrote:
Unlocking them is pretty easy, most of the time it is just the Sim card, plus you can buy unlocked ones on eBay. I got my CDMA Palm Treo new in the box for half what Sprint wanted for it with a contract then went to them and got service, no contract, but I can't move it to say Verizon which also used CDMA without jumping through a bunch of hoops getting the carrier to except a phone not made for their network. I spend obe 40 years working for a Telephone company and then doing contract work after I retired.In article <tFwOi.818$Pv2.326@newssvr23.news.prodigy.net>, Steven Lichter <diespammers@ikillspammers.com> wrote:All Cell phone with the exception of GSM and the older analog phone are set to run on one provider only,
In the old days of Cell phone; 1984 when they really first came out, there were 2 carriers in each area, an A carrier which was also the hardwire carrier IE: GTE and the B carrier IE: LA Cellular; later on t hat changed to the wild west with every one entering the market; but we are getting way off the Apple II subjectA lot of GSM phones are sold locked to one provider only. For an extra fee, you can later have the phone unlocked if you wish. Of course there are also various hacks to unlock several locked phone models. And for our still older NMT mobile phones: they weren't locked up to one provider. No need for that, there WAS only one single provider so the users had no choice!
the main reason is that you get the phone a lot cheaper or free for agreeing to use that provider, I see nothing wrong with that.I bought three phones like that about a year ago: one for my wife, one for my daughter, and an extra for myself. Interestingly and incredibly, these phones weren't locked up to one provider but were free to use for any provider. However, I had to subscribe to one partticular provider for one year for each of the three phones. I selected the cheapest possible subscriptions and never used them - and I ended up getting the phones much cheaper than the regular price, including the cost for the subscriptions I didn't use!
--The Only Good Spammer is a Dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? (c) 2007 I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot In Hell Co.