Buying a US cellphone to work in Canada

Well, we'll see what happens with these UK unlockers tomorrow I guess. My phone is an Android though, not an iPhone. I took a pass on that Kool Aid.

HWY 20 was nothing short of awesome! (whoever you are ??) Just wished i had a bigger tank so we could get some more back roads in. 240km range is not good enough so I am working on a beat up R100 GS tank for my R80. Should get 100km more out of that once I figure out how to get some rather large dents out of it!

You must remember that wet & stormy night and the lightning strikes. BTW I do have some GS parts I may Fleabay, good tank also no dents, remember we did talk GSs.

Bien Oui! Now I recall. You had me going there. Good one!

Well the UK phone unlocers have failed again and will be refunding my fee again. Just like the last time I tried to get them to unlock a Telus phone. They suggest using the provider (damned if I am going to hand over another $50 to Telus unless I have to!!) or trying out a local hacker who do this using a direct USB connection to the phone. I know just such a place so we'll see how he does with this one. He failed the last time too!

Why Telus does this to their customers is beyond me. I've never seen a company go so far out of their way to rip off and alienate customers. This is the same Telus that bragged to their shareholders that they round up air time charges to the minute and do not charge by the second as some providers do. Why? To gouge the customer! Why else? So when you go to the States and make a one minute call to say "I'm fine" if the call is one minute and one second long they charge you two minutes. Which right now is $2.90 plus roaming and taxes!

Last I looked Telus charges $35 to unlock. It was $50 when they first started doing it.

@Commuter Boy: Actually Telus is a HPSA network and it supports GSM. Has done for over 3 years now. I don't know what LTE is but my current Samsung Galaxy S (the first rev) supports all of these bands.

@Tat2: You are correct, they now charge $35 to unlock a phone. It was $50 when I last checked. My old phone could not be unlocked by a 3rd party and it turns out Telus cannot unlock it either! This one was a Samsung SCH-A885 which was a pretend "smart" phone that was actually quite dumb. So unless I want to enable it on the Telus network and I don't it's trash. Pretty sad because the phone was hardly used and still works as a phone quite well. Most of the included apps were full of bugs they never fixed so I gave up on it for the Galaxy S I have now.

The Galaxy CAN be unlocked however so the next step is to find out if it is cheaper to just get a "burn" phone from WallyWorld down in the US or just get a prepay SIMM from AT&T or Verizon or ???

Anyway, I've taken this thread way off topic now. It's more like "making a CDN phone useful in the US"! Sorry bout that! :huh

LTE is the fancy acronym that the industry is using for Long Term Evolution... the next technology after HSPA/HSPA+ which was evolved from GSM (Global Standard for Mobiles).
WRT to iPhones, the locking requirements that Apple slaps on the carriers are pretty significant as they are trying to keep their product exclusive to certain markets and they don't want people buying unlocked phones and selling them into other markets.