buying a phone off ebay....

can i buy one off ebay and put my cingular sim card in there, and it work just fine?

Thanks!!

Sure you can do this IF the phone has been unlocked OR you have the phone unlocked. Also the phone MUST use the same band that Cingular uses (which is (850/1900), for cell service.

Otherwise you'll have a phone that can't be used on the Cingular towers even if it is unlocked.

So before buying a phone on Ebay, read the auction carefully and if the answers are not in the auction ad, email the seller to make certain that the phone you are wanting to bid on/buy, will in fact work in the US and on Cingular's cell frequency band.

ok thanks, is there any other place where i can buy unlocked phones other than ebay for pretty cheap?

Well you can try Craig's List http://www.craigslist.org and pick a city/town close to you (for local pickup), and search under the electronic section for cell phones. A lot of folks sell their old phones and other things through Craig's List. Craig's List is a worldwide option for selling things, kinda like a web based garage sale, without the cheap cardboard flyers stapled to telephone poles pointing to your house.

And when you say cheap what does that mean to you? If you mean OLDER phones, sure you may find them "CHEAP", but you are not going to find any of the newer phones being sold in the stores cheap, that are not stolen. That is if you are talking Razr's for $20 bucks.

The main thing when buying a used phone, you want to make sure it's working, and the ONLY 100% sure way to do that is to see the phone face to face, with your SIM card in it, making a call. So beware phones being sold without batteries (often done so that you can't even see it turn on in a lot of cases).