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Settlement Good News for MotorolaV710 Owners
bluebanzai writes "When hordes of people bought up the Motorola V710 upon its release a year ago, Slashdot readers may remember many impressive features including the cutting edge Bluetooth features (picture/mp3 transfer, wireless syncing) as described on Motorola's website. However, when used with the popular Verizon Wireless cell phone service provider, many Bluetooth features were sadly crippled (apart from a wireless headset) because OBEX features had been purposely disabled by Verizon. Hundreds of people donated to a hacker rewards program to unlock the full features of the phone to the tune of $3000, but was never fully successful.
Well, one year later, the Los Angeles Superior Court (PDF Warning) and Verizon have announced the initial steps of a Class Action Lawsuit that appears to be influenced by the user community allowing everyone who bought it before the start of 2005 a few options for compensation--including a refund up to the purchase price of another phone which, interestingly enough, is a lot easier to hack."
Yes, GSM is getting a foothold in the US market. I myself have been with Cingular/ATT (both GSM) for almost 5 years now.
Like CDMA carriers, GSM isn't problem free.
For example, if you buy a GSM phone, it is most likely locked to the carrier you bought it from. Why do they do this? Because most phones are either "free" or "discountted" with the signing of a contract.
Now, I figure they lock phones for 3 purposes:
1. If your family member destroys their phone somehow, your "locked" phone won't work because they have a different carrier. Thus, they'll be forced to buy a new phone.
2. So you can pay their roaming/international charges when you travel (because a locally bought SIM doesn't work on the locked phone).
3. Profit!
Thankfully, unlock codes/reflashing can easily be done if you know where to find a code calculator, or willing to buy a $10 data cable.
Grump
Unlocked Siemens S40, Mot V400.
Unlocked half my family's nokia phones.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
i realize that the current market is setup (with phone subsidies) so the carriers have incentive to keep you from using phones with another carrier.
but is there any technological barrier? is there any reason that cdma cell phones couldn't be paired with SIM cards?
no, there is no technological barrier. further, some people believe that the importance of supporting next-generation provisioning and wi-fi/3g roaming will lead more of the carriers to support gsm on their networks. you could easily support the gsm provisioning/billing/roaming features on top of a cdma transport. in fact, i believe that some cdma phones with gsm/tdma chipsets built-in for global roaming have been announced/discussed.
it will be interesting to see how long verizon can maintain this technological provincialism. based on their dominance in the marketplace, i would imagine they'll be able to maintain for some time.