[OT] Does anyone have a spare CDMA Cellphone?

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

David Backeberg wrote:
> This won't help you now, but my understanding of GSM is
> that if your phone craps out and your id chip thingie isn't
> hurt you can buy the cheapest crap GSM phone you can find,
> swap in your old id chip thingie, unlock the phone with a
> hack code and resume your regular service while your original
> phone is being repaired.

I have gone traveling outside the USA a couple times this year (am on the road
right now, in fact, carrying a GSM phone that currently offers me the time of
day, an alarm clock, and not much else...;-)

So far I haven not figured out the magic formula to obtain a true global cell
phone but here are a few things I have learned the hard way:

- Providers in the USA adopted a different pair of frequencies for their
towers than those used in almost every other country.  If you have not bought
a triple-band phone (one that supports 3 bands of GSM frequencies, not one
like my Nokia 6340i for which the 3rd band is TDMA, CDMA, or analog).

- The cheapest way to get a GSM phone that works in the frequencies used
overseas is via eBay or by walking up to a vendor in an overseas market.  For
example there is a large well-known shopping mall in Bangkok where you can get
a minimal GSM phone for about $20 or a quite decent one for $50 to $100.

- No matter where you buy a cell phone, the manufacturers are in cahootz with
the cell phone providers to limit coverage to a single provider.  With GSM
this is implemented as a lock which can often be broken via a crack software
package. (Easy enough to find these using Google, less easy to figure out how
to use them.)

- If you want to hack your phone, be watchful of handing out your ESN.  If you
have service activated on your phone (a contract with the likes of Cingular or
Verizon), it's like typing your credit card number into a hacker's website.

- If you want to make calls from overseas back to the USA, by far the least
expensive way is to buy a prepaid SIM card when you are at your destination. 
Roaming fees through your American cellular company are outrageous, usually 10
to 50 times higher.

On my current trip I forgot about the need to unlock my foreign-purchased
phone, blithely thinking it was already unlocked.  (A friendly cellular
provider here offered to sell me a whole new bare-bones phone for about $60,
no thanks.)  I have no idea how to test these things to make sure they're
unlocked, if anyone knows that would be helpful to post a pointer here.  That
way when a vendor tries to sell you a phone, you could demand that it be
unlocked and that they demonstrate it.

-rich