Unlocking Cellphones Becomes Illegal Saturday in the U.S.

somehow I find it amusing that charging once a day is even considered an issue. I just make a habit out of plugging in my phone and ... there it goes. I'm not using it all the time.

chungy said:

somehow I find it amusing that charging once a day is even considered an issue.

Wait until you encounter a situation where one charge per day is not guaranteed, or where you are on the battery's last breath and still have to make an important call, and then we'll talk. That being said, if I expected to find myself a lot in such situations, I'd get a solar charger or a "joule thief" kind of single-AA battery charger: this way I could tap even into discarded batteries as an emergency energy source.

In the first case I'd use a simpler phone for calling. I have a few. In the second case, most of the time there are lots of nearby phones I can use. When I go somewhere I expect unreliable power, damage to phones, or more frequent emergencies then an older phone comes with me.

Your argument shouldn't discourage the use of smartphones, which are pretty cool devices, but it should encourage people to maintain other options. It's easy enough to keep SIM cards and switch to simpler, more robust phones when the need arises. It's also a good idea to make locked phones illegal so it's easier to do this.

Aliotroph? said:

It's easy enough to keep SIM cards and switch to simpler, more robust phones when the need arises. It's also a good idea to make locked phones illegal so it's easier to do this.

Actually, none is preventing you from taking out the SIM from your new fancy smartphone and putting it into anything you want: the lock affects the fancy smartphone itself (will only work with That One SIM card, or with a SIM card from a specific operator, in order to prevent you from breaking your lease).

However, there's no such thing as a "reverse SIM-phone lock", aka a SIM card that will only work on a specific phone (unless it's a non-standard one...but then then phone itself would need to be heavily modified, in which case both would really be useless to keep around).

Get it in your head people, SIM locking is there for a reason:

Wikipedia sez:The reason many network providers SIM lock their phones is that they offer phones at a discount to customers in exchange for a contract to pay for the use of the network for a specified time period, usually between one and three years. This business model allows the company to recoup the cost of the phone over the life of the contract. Such discounts are worth up to several hundred US dollars. If the phones were not locked, users might sign a contract with one company, get the discounted phone, then stop paying the monthly bill (thus breaking the contract) and start using the phone on another network or even sell the phone for a profit. SIM locking curbs this, by prohibiting change of network (using a new SIM). SIM locking is very common if subsidised phones are sold with prepaid contracts.

If some gov't decided to effectively legitimize this practice (YMMV), the worse for the customers, but that's free(?) market for you. The hard truth is, that if you really need to always be in control of your phone, have unrestricted roaming and changing providers like used lemon cups, then you must swallow the bitter cum pay the full price and purchase your device outside of a binding contract. Simple as that.

Unlocking cellphones in Hungary (Central Europe) is also illegal for years now, only the mobile services can do it. It has a fee around 5-10 thousand Hungarian Forints which equals 25-50 U.S. Dollars. This is quite expensive for us.

Also, in Hungary, there are 3 mobile services (Vodafone, Telenor, T-Mobile) and they made a "cartel" (even though this is illegal) and it means that unlocking mobiles makes no sense, because there are almost no difference between calling fees: ~42 HUF/min. (which is ~0.2 USD/min., I think this is f&ckin' expensive)

I hate this country. Not because of it, since I hardly ever use my phone, but it's still wrong.

Is there ANY country where mobile operators are NOT organized into cartels? Otherwise, they'd be waging bitter discount/offering battles against one another and tout aggressive price reductions everyday.

In Greece at least, they only do this "undercover", and only for contract users (not prepaid): the officially posted prices and contractual service terms are all open to individual negotiations between the client and various middlemen that work with the mobile operators on commission.

Personally, I don't have time for this bullshit: the most cost efficient solution seems to be owning a prepaid SIM card from each of the major mobile providers: all of them offer really good prices for calls and SMS within their own networks, and have premium prices for any external calls/messages. Other than owning one of each (and only spending on them on a demand base), any other solution (including most contracts) is less efficient and less flexible, especially if your usage patterns are too irregular/sparse.

I got this update today:

http://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/its-time-legalize-cell-phone-unlocking

Nice and important sharing.Here by i wish to share the update information about unlock phone.Carrier unlock phone.Now it's legal.
Recently i had unlocked my Blackberry Pearl phone from Australia Vodafone network using code.I got the unlock code from http://www.unlock-zone.com here they deliver unlock code to you through mail with unlocking instructions.

bobby said:

Noe it's legal.
Recently i had unlocked my Blackberry Pearl phone from Australia Vodafone network using code.

It's legal in Australia (the "free trade" agreement didn't require us to sign away ALL of our sovereign rights) though there can be fees involved, and restrictions if the phone's tied to a fixed-term contract.

Meanwhile in Canada, the government forces carriers to unlock phones after 90 days.

A spambot using the edit function? What's that about, to make it look like more legit or something?

Aliotroph? said:

Meanwhile in Canada, the government forces carriers to unlock phones after 90 days.

God damn it, Canada! Why you so reasonable?