CELL Phone ??????

[sevenal]

Hey gang !
I had such good fortune with the dual boot question today, I thought I would press my luck.

I need a good, durable, cell phone.
I don't want camera, text, email, or coffee brewer.

I understand the new cell phones have to have GPS so my old cell can't
be activated.
I can't buy a used one on ebay or anything, cause my cell provider won't activate it.

I don't want to spend $200.00 on a phone. I don't mind getting the phone for a penny and signing the two year contract agreement. " US CELLULAR"
However even then I do not want a phone with a bunch of gadgets that i have no interest in using.

Question

Anyone else have a really good simple cell phone that is still an available
item RETAIL, that they can recomend?

Thanks in advance for reading and any suggestions.

sev

[bruceb]

Motorola V262 is simple, very cheap, color display & speakerphone
It does not have a camera and is compatible with US Cellular
They use the CDMA Network, just like Verizon Wireless uses
I am not certain, but they may be owned / operated by VZ Wireless

[G Ray88]

You can get a good basic cell phone through Cingular, mine is just a basic Nokia. I do have the two year thing and most of the time with the two year contract you can get the phone for almost nothing. I have had different Nokia cell phones over the past six years with no problems. Good Luck

[RayH]

I use Sprint and a Sanyo SCP 200. You can get them free at Radio Shack w/activation. It just telephones and instant messages. I got it because my old one was defective and automatically kicking itself onto the internet. I was getting huge bills for the internet service. I had to call customer service each month to get such charges removed. I just got this basic thing and it works just fine.

The problem with color screens is that they may be hard to see in sunlight.

[Davermonk]

I'm not sure if this will be any help, but I'll post it anyway.

I had a motorola phone from Cingular for a year. I wanted to get one of the Razr phones because of the size (and not because of the camera/video camera/coffee maker features which I never use anyway) but I didn't want to sign a new 2-year contract to get one. I ended up buying an unlocked Razr on e-bay.

Out of the box, I was able to put my SIM card from the old phone into the unlocked Razr and I could make & receive calls but I wasn't able to text message or "surf the net."

After some research on some motorola "hacking" forums I found on the net, I figured out how to program (flash) it to a Cingular setup, and now it functions just like my old (cingular-branded) phone but I didn't have to sign a new 2-year contract to get it. In fact, you wouldn't know it wasn't a cingular phone except it doesn't have any external cingular brand markings on it.

Of course, to do this you need a SIM card from your provider.

Good luck with your cell-phone search!

[bruceb]

The only problem with doing that is on Ebay you probably paid
over $150 for the phone and then you need to have and know
how to use software such as P2KMAN & PST among others

[Davermonk]

You're right... I did pay around that for the phone (though I really didn't want to sign the contract, so it was worth it to me).

The software is out there... you just have to do some digging.

As I reread the original post, I see that the goal was cheap phone regardless of commitment. What I posted was just the opposite. Oops!

[bruceb]

I know the software is out there .. when it was offered, I got it
Never know when you will need it