Frank Clarke writes:


This question is mostly for the USians on the group but anyone else is,
naturally, welcome to chime in.


I need advice on a CHEAP way to have a cell phone available for travel in
Europe. It doesn't have to be fancy (God, please let's not get into another
****ing contest over the glories of smart phones!). All it has to do is make
and receive voice calls.

Last time I did this I got a cheap but durable motorola quad-band pay
as you go phone from tmobile far enough in advance so that tmobile
would unlock it for me. At that time, their policy was that they
would unlock phones after 3 months.

I still have the phone and my family uses it when someone's phone
breaks/gets lost.

The time before I bought a Cingular (yes it was a while ago) phone a
week before my trip, and got someone on the internet to unlock it for
me for $5. I later lost that phone.

You can do the analogous thing easily, though with some risk (small
one hopes). For example, Walmart sells the Nokia 1616, which is
quadband but probably comes locked to tmobile. But there are services
on the internet that claim to be able to unlock it for a small number
of dollars. I don't know to figure out which of these places are
legit, but I've been able to hit legit merchants so far, and $2 (what
I recently paid to "factory unlock" my iPhone 3GS) is an acceptable
risk.