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V710 Hacker Reward Program Unsuccessful
maxofthewell points to the announcement at the top of ""Regretfully, the OBEX hacker's contest for the Motorola v710 was unsuccessful. As of the contest's deadline (January 3, 2005) nobody has stepped forward to claim the prize. Many useful inventions and modifications came out of this effort." Full report here."
You're right about the CDMA phones being locked to their carriers, although I've heard a little blurb here and there about how in theory they could interoperate. GSM DOES have the capability of being multi-carrier, but in the US the carriers lock the software to their service. However, these are usually bypassable by either A) buy a european/asian GSM phone and just buying a SIM from the carriers, or B) using software found online to get the unlock code for the phone (usually an algorithm based on the IMEI number) which you enter in and *wham* multi-carrier phone. I'm planning on a European tripto Europe in the next year, so I unlocked my Nokia 3650 (T-Mobile) so when I'm over there I'll just buy a prepaid SIM that has so many minutes and I'll still have my phone.
Viva La Revolucion! Buy a Mac!
In order to bring, say a SprintPCS CDMA phone to Verizon CDMA, you will need to obtain something called a Master Subsidy Lock code or MSL. This code is required for phone programming. This can actually be found by using bitpim and sifting through binary files stored on the handset's file system. A pain...but possible with USB cable.
Now assuming you could find a rep stupid enough to activate this phone. Countless people have tried this in failed, only one or two people I know have actually done this. This through social engineering or them having access to the provisioning system to do so. Ok, so after all this hell, you are left with a voice phone. No data. Yippie.
CDMA carriers customize their phone's firmware to meet their needs. One major difference being, SprintPCS uses J2ME and Verizon uses BREW. A lot of data service offerings are also heavily tailored for specific environments.
With no SIM, and fundimental differences between carriers, you will simply end up with a crippled piece of junk. And I bet you the "free phone" would have more features than that.
The CDMA spec actually has something for SIM-like functionality, but this has really only been popular in asia. Currently, no US carriers have deployed the technology. Very little benefit..honestly.
So why give people the ability to take their phones to the other carrier? Sprint and Verizon eat it when you purchase a phone -- they subsidize the price of handsets. And thats why a Master Subsidy Lock is in place.
Lastly, this lawsuit against Verizon is pure silliness. Lets see here, Verizon lets you return your handset after 15-30 days if it does not work out -- no questions asked. If you do not like their bluetooth offering, return the phone. How can you sue over that? Maybe OBEX and OPP are buggy? These types of firmware lockouts happen all the time due to pressing release dates and buggy features.