Motorola i850 from Nextel to tmobile?

Hello-

I have a simple, yet, complicated question. I am currently with T-mobile as my service provider. Long story short...I have a very basic phone, nothing all that special, but through a friend was able to get a Motorola i850.

The phone is linked here: http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=735

Of the people I have talked to some have said I could get this phone to work with my current tmobile service and sim card (though they did not know specifically how), and some have said that a Nextel phone will not work with the Tmobile system.

My question is can I get this Motorola i850, which I would really like to be able to use, to work with my current tmobile service? If so could you please tell me how, or offer links, etc. to show me how I can accomplish this.

(ps. inserting my current SIM card does nothing and leaves the phone telling me to insert a SIM card. For what it is worth I thought I would add that.)

No, your Nextel phone will not work with T-Mobile. They use different technology to make and receive calls. T-Mobile is GSM and Nextel is iDEN, these two technologies are incompatible with each other. Sorry

Alright, I appreciate your response. Just to clarify, even if I had the unlock code for this i850 phone I could not use it with my tmobile SIM card due to the different frequencies (since the two companies do not allow you to "roam" off each other). Correct?

It would be like trying to put diesel into a gasoline engine, iDEN and GSM are very different technologies, and there is no way to make an i850 work on a non-iDEN network. Any unlocked GSM phone will work with T-Mobile (as long as it has the GSM 1900mhz band they use), but iDEN is in a class all by itself.

to eBay it is.

One more side note, with T-Mobile, the 850mhz band is not used, but make sure the phone you buy has 850mhz if you want to be able to roam on other carriers' GSM networks

the only nextel phone that can be used with GSM is the i930.....