Printable View
Hi everybody,
Can anybody tell me whether it is possible to unlock a BB (currently with Rogers.ca but might change for Bell.ca) and use it with a European prepaid sim card during travel?
If yes: are there prepaid sim cards for voice AND data?
And: Do carriers care about you unlocking your phone (Is it legal? Do they still provide technical support if you do so?)?
Thanks!
Unlocking your BlackBerry is perfectly legal. There's no way for a carrier to know if you've even unlocked it without them physically looking at it. The availability of prepaid SIMs will vary from carrier to carrier. When I was in Toronto, I bought a prepaid SIM from Mobilicity. In the US, you can get prepaid SIMs from T-Mobile or Simple Mobile. I'm not very sure about Europe, but I believe that O2 and Orange offer prepaid service. There are plenty more in the UK that do as well.
You may have to do a bit of research to ensure the data plan includes BIS Blackberry access. A plain data plan will not give you email and BBM. In addition, you will have to setup your email on the new carriers system.
A better option may be to have an unlocked gsm phone for the european sim cards and keep your Blackberry on Rogers, but just have the wifi turned on to deal with email when you have wifi available. You can also set the data services off when roaming, but the more experienced can tell you if it really eliminates the data charges. In other words, with data roaming off you should still be able to receive and make calls and when you get wifi coverage at hotels you can get BBM, and email over the wifi.
The main reason I switched to Rogers years ago was for the few times I traveled to Europe. At the time it cost about $1.50 a minute to make or receive calls from Canada to Europe. I thought it was a small price to pay to have the peace of mind that I could be reached if something important came up.
Vodafone and Orange are great carriers that offer both voice and data with BIS... Very reasonable prices.
Cell phone unlocking is legal in most of countries and the ban is lifted.Now anyone can unlock their mobile from network lock by getting the service from the network provider or by an third party online vendor like Mobile-Unlocker.com .After getting your mobile unlocked you can use any other GSM network sim in your mobile .
Camera will look bad when recording video.
Q10
2 year dead thread, thank you asharoslin for the revival. I bet the original poster has already resolved this.
Just sayin.