I currently have a cell phone with Verizon. My laptop and car both support Bluetooth, but Verizon currently doesn’t offer any phones that support it.
So, rather than wait for them to get my act together, is it possible for me to buy a Bluetooth-compatible phone from an online retailer (or on EBay), and then just call them up to have them add it to my plan? Or are there technical problems with bringing phones between different cell networks?
Err…that should read “get their act together”.
Theoretically yes. As long as the phone you purchase supports the CDMA 1x network Verizon uses (at least, that’s what they use in my area), you should be fine. I have had problems with Verizon activating off network phones though. They’ll do it reluctantly, but they might try to convince you it’s impossible =).
Hm, mrAru works customer service for verizon, and I was sure they have at least 1 phhone with bluetooth because I was listening in the other night to him tell somone that we know that they need to update the bluetooth drivers, and I know their phone is a verizon…I can ask him when he gets home tonight if you like=)
There are problems with you doing this. I used to work for Sprint PCS and we’d run into this porblem all the time. If a phone is manufactured for one cell phone company, it’s useless as far as the other cell phone companies are concerned. Each phone has an “activation code” which is known only to the cell phone company the phone is manufactured for. Without that code (and the odds of you being able to get the cell phone company to give you the code are pretty slim), the other company can’t do anything with the phone. Plus, if the phone is a different model/brand than what the cell phone company offers, the techs will have no idea of how to properly program the phone, even if you do have the activation code.
Next buying a used cell phone off of eBay or anywhere else isn’t a good idea, unless you can call the cell phone company and give them the ESN first. That way they can check to see if the phone’s stolen or if the previous owner has an outstanding bill. If the phone’s been stolen or if the owner still owes the cell phone company money, you’re not going to be able to use the phone.
I’ve heard that some companies will happily give up the code once the owner of the phone has been a customer for a few months (to make sure the company breaks even on the subsidized phone), or if they have an online activation system, you can sometimes get a code from the web site by pretending you want to activate the phone on their network.
Also, FTR, Verizon doesn’t lock their phones. Probably because Sprint PCS won’t activate a Verizon phone anyway, and the other CDMA companies are pretty small.
Perhaps true, but the information you need is the same for each phone, the only difference is how you get to the programming menus and how those menus are labeled. If Verizon’s techs won’t support the phone, you can still program it yourself (instructions for programming the phone should be easy to find online) and change your account’s ESN to the new phone on Verizon’s web site.
At Sprint we were instructed to never tell the customer what the code we were giving them was for. There was also two or three “throwaway” codes which could be used once to activate the phone. The new G3 phones that Sprint was introducing when I left required 400 steps to manually program.
That’s changing. Apparently, everyone’s switching to CDMA.
I don’t know how Verizon’s system works, but you couldn’t do that with Sprint’s system when I worked there, since if the system didn’t already have the ESN in the system (the ESNs were given to Sprint when the phones were shipped from the manufacturer and entered into Sprint’s data base) you wouldn’t be able to activate it.
Well, sure. The online systems don’t say “here is your phone’s subsidy lock code: 123456” either, they just tell you which buttons to push, and some of those correspond to the lock code. But you can find directions online explaining how to get the lock code by pretending to activate your phone, either through social engineering or by using an online system.
Really? I haven’t heard of, say, Cingular or T-Mobile moving away from GSM.
Yeah… that’s unique to Sprint PCS. Sprint won’t activate phones they didn’t sell, but Verizon will.
Don’t have time to search for a cite, but I was reading an article a few months back on Qualcomm that was talking about how all the various cellular companies are switching over to Qualcomm’s CDMA system. IIRC, the GSM standard wasn’t flexible enough for some of the newer features that folks want to incorporate into phones. Sprint is supposed to have streaming TV broadcasts available over their phones in the near future (why in the hell anyone would want to watch TV on a pathetically small cell phone screen is a mystery to me).
That’d be great. I’ve tried two Verizon stores and even their customer service number, and they all said that they don’t have any Bluetooth-compatible phones at the moment.
<channeling mrAru>
Bluetooth and Verizon - We had initially a bluetooth phone about a year an a half ago, the phone itself worked well, the bluetooth function on it was fairly disappointing, it had a fairly limited range and there were problems with the bluetooth programming itself integrating with other units. Right now the only bluetooth device being offered is a Jabra earwave handsfree headset, it cam integrate with other bluetooth units, and it does have a limited range and though it is a bit more reliable than the previous bluetooth unit we offered. Right now there is a bluetooth 2 device intesting [a phone, motorola 710] Bluetooth 2 which is hte updated version of the original bluetooth can be used with bluetooth 1 items, it has an extended range and shows a greater reliability. It should be available from verizon in the next couple of months.
</channeling mrAru>
Let me know if you have any more questions=) either bluetooth or verizon, will be glad to channel him again=)