Old cell phones

[messymessy]

Before you sell that old cell phone for $6 a pound, you might look and see if it has any resale value as a vintage cell phone.

http://news.yahoo.com/forget-apps-old-s ... 43876.html

Apparently, it's becoming trendy to use old cell phones.

[fansubs_ca]

I guess I'm back in style now! (My phone is a model from 2002.)

The big flaw to "going retro" though, at least here in north America is that as
new bands of spectrum are allocated and released the new entrants to the
market with be in the new spectrum. So as a consumer to benefit from more
competition on rate plans you might have to narrow your choice of phone
to what's compatible with the new networks frequency range.

Also in Europe GSM was predominant, HSPA phones are backward compatible
to GSM so the carriers have a lot of reason to keep the legacy network around
at least until they fill every hole in their HSPA network.

Here in North America it's a bit messier. Digital started out with CDMA and
TDMA competing with CDMA being a bit more dominant. The TDMA carriers
eventually added GSM and for quite a while were running analog, TDMA and
GSM. The CDMA carriers only had to run analog and CDMA for quite some
time. The GSM carriers could transition to HSPA using their GSM network
as a fall back and could do the transition gradually. CDMA kinda stoped
developing so the CDMA carriers had to run CDMA and HSPA networks in
parallel. (Most started building HSPA after they turned off analog.) Since
the CDMA network has no fall back value for HSPA customers like GSM
does I suspect the CDMA networks will be turned off long before the last
GSM site is taken down.

So if I don't change before then one day I will have to replace my CDMA
phone as there will be no network to support it. I have a pretty good CDMA
plan grandfathered right now but for a new person signing up a phone today
in my market they will generally get a way better rate plan with an HSPA
phone than a CDMA phone. So for them they basically can't use an old
CDMA phone unless they are willing to pay more on an ongoing basis to
use it.

Myself I'm hanging onto my CDMA phone and grandfathered plan until:
-I have a work related reason to need a data capable device
-My last spare CDMA phone dies.
-Telus turns off their CDMA network in Winnipeg
-Someone comes out with a plan better than what I have that
neccessitates a new phone to take advantage of it. (The best
plans available for the HSPA phones right now are just slightly
more than I am currently paying per month.)

I have a feeling retro-CDMA may not end up as popular as
retro-GSM. (I'm not sure if TDMA networks have already
disapeared or if not how close the are to going away.) I
imagine IDEN doesn't have much life left in it either. ^_-

Being network dependant the usefullness/cost to operate
a retro device is largely out of your hands and arbitrary.
As opposed to my VCRs and Laser Disc player which I can
keep using as long as they continue to work. ^_-

[68Camaro]

Best voice service I had was TDMA circa 2002-4. GSM was a step down, and by comparison modern digital service sucks. Half the time I can hardly hear the call, or the other person can hardly hear me.