If you try to leave a company and your cell phone is tied to a particular service provider, your phone is locked and won’t work. If you are trying to use another service on your old phone, it will also won’t work either. You will have the freedom to use the same phone with different service accounts depending on kind of phone, what company you purchase. What is difference between an unlocked and a locked cell phone? Having an unlocked phone can be a good thing or not it is legal?
Cell Phone Unlocking
Two cell phone technologies are used by mobile phone service providers:
- GSM (Global System for Mobile communication)
- CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access).
Your phone is not unlockable if you have a CDMA. GSM phones use SIM cards. A SIM (subscriber identity module) card is a small card that is inserted into the cell phone. It contains all your contacts linked to your account. You can put it into another phone by taking the SIM card out. You will also use a different SIM card in your unlocked phone, and if someone calls your number, the phone will ring. CDMA phones are validated by the service provider and have no SIM cards, which is impossible to unlocking a phone.
The service provider has installed some on the phone, if a phone is locked. This software ties serial number of that particular phone to the SIM card subscriber ID number. The phone won’t work with other SIM cards and the SIM card will not work in other phones, if the phone serial number and SIM card number haven’t matched.
Nearly, all phones are GSM in Europe and based on the service provider you will generally determine whether your phone is GSM or CDMA in North America, while Sprint and Verizon use CDMA.
How will you tell whether your phone is already unlocked? There is a way to find out. Firstly search for a friend whose phone is known to be unlocked. Place his or her SIM card in your phone, and call your friend’s number. If the phone rings then your phone is unlocked or else it is your phone is locked. If the phone is locked it simply generates an error message.
How to Unlock GSM Phones
There are two explanations to unlock a phone. One is, by unlocking a phone, it gives you the freedom to switch between different service providers. You will also change service providers as you like. The other is, while traveling to different countries, you will rack up with vast roaming fees. Some companies offer SIM cards that work across much of the continent but not in one country.
The process of unlocking a phone is quite simple, and it will not require any technical knowledge. You have to enter a numeric code for some phones and some third party companies will provide unlock codes for a fee which ranges above $5 depending on the model of your phone.
Few service providers, to unlock a phone, they connect phones to a special device through the phone’s data port.
How to Unlock Smartphones
Smartphones have a different unlocking set-up. They are basically handheld mobile computers. Locking and unlocking smartphones is a more complicated process than the regular cell phones.
Smartphones are regularly locked to a service provider like the iPhone which is locked to the AT&T network. Smartphones unlocking is not a matter and here the users mainly need to control the applications they will install on their device. A lot of smartphone manufacturers lock the devices to install only approved applications like the iPhone which can only install apps from Apple’s App Store.
You will apply a software crack to an iPhone to unlock and this process is often referred to as ‘jailbreaking’ the phone. The software on a smartphone is more difficult than regular cell phone unlocking process. The software cracks may have irregular results and leads to non-functional.
Is Cell Phone Unlocking Legal?
However, laws differ from country to country, cell phone unlocking is legal in some countries. In the United States, they declared that unlocking a phone does not intrude on the copyright of the phone manufacturer. They suggested that locking phones only serves to support a particular business model. Unlocking a phone may interrupt the terms of any contract you may have signed with your service provider.
