I heard that it was possible to get cell phones made for foreign countries (in my case, made for Taiwan) to work in America through some sort of adapter or conversion, but I don’t have the faintest clue how. My Google-fu doesn’t seem to get me anywhere.
Is there a way? Preferably one that costs less than getting a new cell phone?
If it’s a GSM phone, it will work just fine. You’ll need to register it with a telephone service provider.
Not necessarily. If it’s a regular second-generation (2G) GSM phone, it needs to work on at least one of the North American GSM frequency bands (1900 MHz and 850 MHz.) Most third-generation (3G) services work on the same frequency bands. Non-GSM services (CDMA) also work on the same bands.
Official listing of GSM coverage maps and frequency information, by country.
Taiwan is listed as having 2G GSM phones on 900 MHz and 1800 MHz bands, and 3G phones on the 2100-MHz band.
The States is listed as having both 2G and 3G phones on the 850-MHz and 1900-MHz bands. There are a couple of exceptions.
You’ll need a quad-band 2G phone to work in both countries.
Best bet is just buy a new unlocked phone (eBay) that will work on US frequency and slide your SIM card in.
It should work just fine if it’s fairly new. You might have to search what band is manually but there’s nothing special to it usually. I have multiple taiwanese made HTC and they have worked fine for the past 3 or 4 generations.
If you’re in the US permanently, then you need a US based carrier’s sim card and plan.
cooking with gas, this is GQ and your answer was ahem not really relevant.
Ahem yourself. It is relevant to note that it might be easier and more reliable to meet the objective of the OP by buying a cheap phone that is already compatible with the target system than to attempt some type of hacked conversion.