UK to US?

Is it possible to buy a cell phone in the UK/online store and bring
it/ship it back to the US and have it work? Maybe by unlocking it??
>From what I understand most work on the same frequency... or is that
not the main issue?

Their phones are just so much more awesome then ours, we're so far
behind in cellphone technology.

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In message <[email protected]>
[email protected] wrote:

>Is it possible to buy a cell phone in the UK/online store and bring
>it/ship it back to the US and have it work? Maybe by unlocking it??
>>From what I understand most work on the same frequency... or is that
>not the main issue?
>
>Their phones are just so much more awesome then ours, we're so far
>behind in cellphone technology.

If it's GSM, and supports the right frequencies for your provider, it
should work -- You might need to get it unlocked, but that should be the
only problem.

--
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.... Provided you're between the right man and woman!

<[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Is it possible to buy a cell phone in the UK/online store and bring
> it/ship it back to the US and have it work? Maybe by unlocking it??
>>From what I understand most work on the same frequency... or is that
> not the main issue?
>
> Their phones are just so much more awesome then ours, we're so far
> behind in cellphone technology.
>


Yup no worries so long as the UK phone is triband and unlocked it should
work with USA T-mobile. Some phone come unlocked already.

--



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On 2006-09-12, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
> Is it possible to buy a cell phone in the UK/online store and bring
> it/ship it back to the US and have it work? Maybe by unlocking it??
>>From what I understand most work on the same frequency... or is that
> not the main issue?

Since no one with specific knowledge of UK phones seems to have
commented on this, I can give you the generic list of things to
worry about when buying foreign cell phones.

- As a practical matter you need support for GSM850 and GSM1900
in the US. Since UK phones require GSM900/GSM1800, you'll need to
limit yourself to quad-band phones (which support all 4 of these
bands). The majority of UK handsets are not quad-band phones so
this limitation is serious.

- UK 3G phones, which support a 2100 MHz band as well, are a waste
in the US. Only the quad-band GSM phones are useful.

- You can only get GSM phones in the UK, which means you'll be
constrained to use GSM carriers (e.g. Cingular and T-Mobile, but
not Verizon or Sprint) in the US. Whether this is a good choice
or not depends on where you live and where you travel in the US.

- You need an unlocked phone. In countries where handsets are normally
sold unbranded this is not a problem, but in the UK you'll need to
be careful since most phones I've seen there seem to be branded to
one carrier or another, and there is a good chance these will be
SIM-locked. Don't count on getting a locked phone unlocked in the
US; even if it is possible to do the people in the US who do this are
much less likely to know what to do with a handset model which isn't
sold in the US.

- Countries which are more densely populated than the US often have
better and more complete cell coverage than in the US, which in
turn can mean that phones with quite crappy radios can be perfectly
usable overseas but just miserable to rely on in the US (I've had
some hard experience with this). Of course many overseas phones
are very good, but if you find a really attractive looking
quad-band GSM handset model over there which US carriers aren't
selling then you do have to worry about why the US carriers aren't
selling it...

- If you just want to talk on the phone, or send SMS messages, then
any GSM phone which meets the constraints above will work just
fine. If you want to use data or other fancy value-added services
from a US carrier, however, it is a lot more of a crap shoot whether
the support provided by the phone will work with the carrier.

- Be aware that foreign software loads may have quirks which may make
perfect sense in the home market but are annoying outside of it.
For example, some of the Hong Kong phones I have drop the country
code from the incoming caller ID, for reasons which aren't clear to
me (another example is the habit of many US phones to put dashes
between the 3rd and 4th, and the 6th and 7th, digits when displaying
10-digit numbers, something which is fine in the US but which often
makes no sense at all with foreign numbers).

> Their phones are just so much more awesome then ours, we're so far
> behind in cellphone technology.

While foreign phones can work just fine in the US, you should realize
that the reason you want to do this is exposing you to more risk than
I would be comfortable with. I have purchased phones in Hong Kong for
about 5 years now, but the reason I do this is that I travel a lot
and I really need a phone that is reliably unlocked. In Hong Kong
unbranded, unlocked phones are widely sold, and I travel there often
enough that getting service on the phone if I have trouble is not
a problem. Note, however, that I don't need US data services and
other fancy features to work, I limit myself to phone models
which are also sold by US carriers as an attempt to avoid phones with
radios unsuitable for (much inferior to densely-packed Hong Kong)
US cell coverage, and I am tolerant of the software quirks foreign
phones sometimes come with.

If you explicitly want an "awesome" model phone not sold in the US,
if you want to buy in the UK where branded phones are common, and
if you don't travel to the UK frequently enough to make getting
service for the phone easy, then you stand more of a chance of ending
up with something unusable than I would be willing to accept.

Dennis Ferguson