My adventures in used phones...

Well, I learned a little bit last week. You see, my "old" Nokia phone was breaking. Two buttons stopped working... two of the most important buttons. First, the "go back" (in the menu) button stopped working, which makes it annoying to look up contacts or play games on your phone. Annoying because I had to use the "hang up" button to go back to the home screen each time. Also, some features while talking also become impossible.

The second button to break was the "hang up" button, which then meant I had to turn off my phone to end phone calls, stop games, or get back to the home screen. Needless to say, I needed a new phone.

Usually, I go to the Cingular store, get ask for the cheapest phone they have that I can upgrade to. They show me the expensive ones, and I say, what about that one that says it's free? They say, it doesn't have many features, and no one likes it, and I say I like it, and they forget about upselling me.

The "free" phone usually costs about $40 dollars because they "have to" charge you the taxes on the retail price, and they "have to" charge you a phone upgrade fee because it costs them $25 to open both phones and move a little chip from one phone to another. Tough job. It takes 5 minutes to do, and that works out to $300 an hour.

So I decided to try something new. I had heard about "unlocked" phones, which sounds really sexy, but usually, it just means that you can use the phone with more carriers, or you can use more features of the phone, like bluetooth.

I don't care about features really, and I was happy buying a cheap phone.

The first thing I learned is that if you don't care about fancy features, you can get a really cheap phone on eBay ($14 with shipping). The second thing I learned is that if you buy a phone that works with one provider (Cingular, Sprint, AT&T), it doesn't work with the others. The way I found that out is this: I bought a phone from a guy who marketed his phone as a AT&T, Cingular phone. I don't think he knew that AT&T and Cingular were not compatible. I certainly didn't know it.

So when I got the phone I was all excited and put my chip in. Turn on phone. Get message: "Phone Restricted". "Enter Restriction Code:" with a box for me to enter the code. I thought it wanted a password. I tried the basics... 1234, 4321, 1111. Clearly, I was not going to guess the number. Then I tried emailing the guy telling him my problem and asking for the password. No response.

Then I saw the line that said "carrier: AT&T, Cingular" and I guessed the problem. This phone will only work with AT&T! So I search on what code to enter. It turns out it's not a simple code. There is a phone ID marked on the inside of your phone that a technician can use to "unlock" the phone for all providers.

I ended up paying $5 to a group of guys that unlock phones by giving you the code via their website.

In the end, I paid $19 for a new, less-advanced phone. I will know what to do the next time I try this, but I'll never go to the Cingular store again, unless I "need" a phone with fancy features and they have a good price on it.

... as I side note, be careful if you sell old phones and PDAs. The "complete reset" function doesn't always delete your data. The phone I bought had not been reset at all, so I had a bunch of phone numbers of this guys friends and family. But I saw on ZDNet or CNet that sometimes people can use PCs to undelete information on a PDA. Very scary if you have important info on your phone.