Advantages of an Unlocked Cellphone

 There are some very good reasons why people prefer to have a cell phone that is not proprietary to a certain carrier.  It allows an individual to buy a phone that they like that their service provider does not offer and use it on their current phone plan.  The service providers feel that they must keep the phones they sale proprietary to their network because of the low cost of buying a phone when signing up for calling plan.  Without keeping the phones proprietary the carriers feel they will lose money.  This is not necessarily in the best interest of their customers as they don’t offer all the phones available on the market.  The second advantage is that it allows a customer to be free of a service contract.  They can purchase an unlocked phone and never have to resign a 1 or 2 year contract again.  The third advantage is that you can often times purchase phones that are not even available in the United States and you would be able to use it with your current calling plan as long as the phones band is supported by your carriers network. 

Disadvantages of an Unlocked Cellphone

There are some disadvantages to purchasing this type of phone.  The first being that they tend to be fairly costly.  In most cases you do end up paying almost the full price for the phone if you purchase one brand new, unlocked and ready to go.  If you don’t purchase one brand new there are two other options.  One being to ask your carrier to unlock your phone.  They might do this for a service fee, but this does not always mean your phone will have full functionality afterwords.  Some features of your cell phone make not work.  The second being to hack your phone.  There are many websites on the Internet that offer instructions on how to hack a mobile phone.  This tends to be a very risky option because if you don’t know what your doing you can fairly easily cause your phone to not operate any longer.  If you can get it to work properly this can be the cheapest option you have available to you.  The highest risk offers this highest reward in this situation. 

In the United States the only networks that operate on the GSM network are AT&T(formerly Cingular) and T-Mobile.  If you use either of these networks as your service provider then you have the option for an unlocked mobilephone. 

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to leave a comment and I will respond back.  Here are some great options for buying unlocked cellphones.

The Best Overall Site Goes To CellHut

CellHut.com in my opinion is an excellent website.  They have a great selection of unlocked cellphones with competitive prices.  According to Alexa websites ranking they have the best rankings of all the websites I will be providing here.  There site is secure which will help with the prevention of hackers stealing your financial information when making your purchase.  They have a fraud prevention page on their site explaining the steps they take to help prevent fraud and tips to customers to avoid being scammed by other site.  I recommend checking it out, there are helpful tips here.

Second In-line Goes To PureMobile

PureMobile.com is an eye pleasing website to look at.  It is simple and clean and they provide the known sources verifying that they are a legitimate website.  They also use scan alert which is a well known company that scans websites on a daily basis and certifies that they are hacker safe.  Websites that show their site has been tested daily definitely want to protect their customers financial information and security.  This website also has an excellent selection of unlocked cellphones which great prices.  This site was very close to coming in 1st but they do not get as much traffic as CellHut does.  I am sure it is only a matter of time before they catch up. 

Third Place Goes To Cellular-Blowout

This is another good source when deciding to make a purchase for an unlocked cellphone.  They offer and excellent selection of phones and do provide some good information to inform their customers of what an unlocked phone is and the differences from a locked cell phone.  The main reason why I rated this website in third place was because I did not find much information in regards to protection customers from fraud.  The only thing I found on the site was the Yahoo 128 encryption for secure checkout.  This is definitely a good thing but I do believe the first two sites are a little more proactive in preventing fraud.  There prices are very competitive and it appears they do have great customer service.  This is most definitely a site worthy of checking out if you are considering making a purchase. 

 Ultimately it is up to you as a customer to decide which site you want to make your purchase with but I do recommend all three of these sites.  I would feel completely confident in making a purchase from any of them.  There are a couple of sources that I do feel are worth of mention.  The first being 1800mobiles.com  , they do offer phones that have been unlocked but this is not their primary focus on their website.  I mention it because it is worth checking out.  The second site to mention if eBay.  EBay is a great source for almost anything you can think of and is a great source for these types of phones.  The most important thing to keep in mind when purchasing on eBay is to research the seller.  Read the feedback that has been left by other buyers, especially read their negative feedback.  You will probably find the most competitive prices on eBay but you also might be taking the most risk if you don’t do you homework on the seller.  Please keep in mind though that if you pay with PayPal you do have some built in protection if you never receive the item you paid for. 

Please feel free to leave a comment if you have a question or if you have had any experience buying from any of the sites I have mentioned.