[kwlug-disc] android phone, anyone?

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

Well, I am one of those people who had a Rogers phone (some Motorola)
with a GSM SIM card from them too. I hated the phone and got an HTC unlocked
one with a sliding keyboard, touchscreen, WiFi, ..etc. from eBay. Put my SIM
card in it and it works fine.

I have a prepaid plan which comes to less than $10 per month ($100 lasts a
year
and carries forward if you do not use it all).

The catch? They charge more for data than on the original phone. They can
easily detect that because the IMEI number is different. But there is a
business
reason for this: the Motorola used a WAP proxy and hence the pages I browsed
were converted to a very small size byte wise. With the HTC phone, I was
browsing
the web as it is, graphics and all. So the $0.05 per page price no longer
applies.

Bottom line: they detect that you changed the phone, not via any hidden
firmware
or all that, but a simple match of the SIM vs. the IMEI number. They let you
use the
handset you chose, with the above caveat re: data.

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 8:17 PM, R. Brent Clements <rbclemen at gmail.com>wrote:

> Bell has a couple of "world edition" phones that do GSM if you put a
> card in them. I heard that rogers spent millions of dollars finding a
> way to detect if a Rogers Sim card was in a non-Rogers phone. The
> solution was apparently hidden firmware that periodically phones home.
>
> On 12/17/09, Gary Walsh <gwalsh at notw.ca> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 15:21 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> >> On Thu, 17 Dec 2009, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
> >>
> >> > For handsets, there is a new Android "Droid" phone that is getting
> >> > good reviews.
> >>
> >>   is that available thru a canadian carrier?  i didn't see it as an
> >> option anywhere i was shopping.
> >>
> > It is known as the Motorola Milestone in Canada and Europe and will be
> > available from Telus in the new year.
> > --
> > Gary Walsh <gwalsh at notw.ca>
> >
> >
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> >
>
> --
> Sent from my mobile device
>
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-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
http://2bits.com
Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. --  Edsger W.Dijkstra
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. --   Leonardo da Vinci
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