[ale] Moving my phone into the 20th Century

[Horkan Smith]

FWIW, I used my Droid 3 in Italy last summer w/ a 3rd party SIM.  At the time, I was still using the stock ROM.  The process wasn't as clean as I would have liked (I had to reboot the phone sometimes to get it to find a tower), and for my short visit it actually ended up cheaper to use Verizon's services w/ the Verizon SIM.  FYI, the Droid 3 is listed as a Global phone and has a SIM slot - other Verizon phones may behave differently.

We did have to call Verizon first to get 'em to both unlock the phone for alternate SIM use (and the phone apparently still rejects US-based towers, btw.)  We also signed up for a Global plan amendment and paid a seperate fee for a better global voice and data plan.  Customer service was pretty helpfull in getting it all set up.

My wife's iPhone 4GS behaved similarlly to the Droid 3, if I recall correctly - I didn't experiment with it as much.  The Global unlock was more of a pain here - had to wipe and re-install from iTunes.  (For the Droid 3 I put in the foreign SIM and got prompted for an unlock code.)

The Droid 3 only used the SIM for GSM mode BTW - it works just fine w/out it here in the US.  It's only a 3G phone, so I can't comment on 4G behavior.

later!
   horkan

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 10:15:28AM -0400, Michael Campbell wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 10:09 AM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
> > FYI: The (fairly) new Motorola Razr M model at Verizon uses a SIM card
> 
> I think the SIM part of CDMA-only phones (not sure if the Razr M
> qualifies there) is for the 4G functionality.  You can't, as far as I
> know, use the phone on another network simply by changing SIMs.
> 
> (If I'm wrong here someone please tell me so I can be less stupid
> today than I was yesterday.)
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-- 
Horkan Smith
678-777-3263 cell, ale at horkan.net