Ah, the mobile phone. Symbol of business connection, symbol of celebutante status. OK, not really, and this is most definitely not the case for the rest of us.

Cell phones are almost a given in life today, with every grandma and great uncle rocking a Motorola RAZR. Most are happy with such and happy with whatever their carrier gives them, but here’s a secret: You can do better.

Let’s start with a crash course in the mobile phone scene.

It’s early 2010 and the major carriers here in Canada have all moved to phones that use SIM cards. Before, Telus/Koodoo (same company) and Bell/Virgin/Solo (also the same company) used something called CDMA, or what I call the “SIM-card-challenged”.

You may also have heard of WIND Mobile, a new carrier that was just launched in a few cities. They use SIM cards also, albeit with a catch (more on that later). Rogers/Fido (also the same company), under the direction of the late Ted Rogers, pushed to adopt SIM cards long ago and the move cemented their place of dominance in the industry, bad service notwithstanding.

For years, the world looked at Canada, threw back their heads and laughed into their exotic mobile phones. We had it bad. Pricing was atrocious, phone selection was abysmal and what the heck was a three-year, sign-here-in-blood contract? These were all hurdles that the average Canadian consumer had to overcome.

Thankfully, there are people in this country who occasionally take trips to, well, any other continent. From these trips people realized that they could buy phones from other countries and with little to no work, use them here. Thus, the import phone scene was born.

The beauty of using SIM cards is that the phones can be made carrier agnostic. In Hong Kong, for example, phones usually come “unlocked” and they can follow the customer to whichever carrier just by switching the SIM.

In Canada, phones are always locked. Always. That being said, unlocking a phone isn’t the most difficult of things to do. There are shops where that can be done, as well as websites which allow you to buy unlock codes. It really is as simple as entering some numbers. Or not.

An unlocked phone isn’t guaranteed to work everywhere due to the differing phone frequencies across the globe. Basically, the world can be split into two regions: North America, and everywhere else. That’s not 100% true, probably closer to 97%, but the point is made.

A few years back, to get a cool phone you had to make sure that it was a “world phone.” At that time that would mean at least three bands of GSM, the type of radio that used SIM cards. Later on, “quad-band” phones were what you needed, then third-gen SIM card tech (a.k.a. 3G) finally arrived in Canada and the rules went out the window.

You see, with a new radio technology came new frequencies that were needed. Great! Even more letters in the mobile phone alphabet soup.

So then, what kind of phone could you get now? What radios would it need? Will Rogers ever be good to me? Ha, come back next time for the conclusion, when you’ll find out how to stay one mobile step ahead!

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AJ Pau

In describing AJ within 50 words, “mobile” and “phone” would show up for sure. Beginning with a palmOne Treo 650 long ago, AJ’s used many devices from Europe, Japan, even North America. He’s dabbled with the Internet since discovering Netscape 1.0 as a child and is neurally linked to Twitter.

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