Gsm unlocked phone? ?

Question

I recently purchased a gophone card. They say that i can purchase any cingular or ATT cellphone. Would the sony ericsson S500i phone that is gsm unlocked be usuable in the United State and with the gophone payment? I am unsure what gsm unlocked means?

Answer 1

GSM is the technology (uses sim cards)

Unlocked means the phone will except any carriers sim card

When looking to purchase a phone for ATT, if it is not a ATT/Cingular phone then you have to make sure the phone is unlocked and supports the GSM bands that ATT uses. ATT is GSM850/1900 so any phone you choose would have to have those bands.

The SE S500i is a quadband phone and will work almost anywhere in the world and will work fine with ATT. Here are the spec's from the SE website, notice that it lists GSM850 and GSM1900 - Thats what you look for

http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/products...

If you also want to use the phone with ATT data, you will have to manually change the data settings to match the ATT medianet settings. Settings can be found on the ATT support website