Every phone I’ve ever bought in the past I’ve bought from Verizon store and the cost is always egregiouy extortionate. I know there is a less expensive way. Please tell me.
How to be sure the second-hand phone is in good shape & functional & legal & not stolen/ resold by criminals etc?
Update: Thanks y’all! I made my selection & purchase through Swappa. You made a girl happy today.
Sure! “Locked” means that it has to be activated on and can only be used with a specific carrier network. Back in the day almost all phones were sold by and locked to the carrier, and usually paid off as part of your phone plan, the idea being to lock YOU in to the carrier by making you buy a whole new device to switch networks. That might sound anticompetitive… 😶
Now, phones can be unlocked to work on different networks even if they were bought locked, and it can be really easy online, or a bit of a process depending on the carrier.
My recommendation would be to go unlocked. It’s just less of a headache.
Thank you. On swappa they do not specify whether a phone is locked or unlocked* but they do provide a warning that if a phone is locked it cannot be unlocked. 🤔 I’m a bit leery of this. What do you suppose that’s all about?
But when I browse their “unlocked” category first they say it can be activated by any carrier, then read further down it says it can only be activated by three carriers: “unlocked” (is that even the name of a carrier?) or “cricket” or some other carrier I’ve never heard of. If I buy a phone from their “unlocked” category but it says it can only be unlocked by cricket or whatever, could T-Mobile not unlock it for me? I am a T-Mobile customer.
https://swappa.com/faq/devices/unlocked-device
This has most of the information you’re looking for. As it says, an unlocked US phone might not be compatible with a foreign carrier (like if you go to another country) because not all carriers use the same “radio band frequencies” for carrying their phone signals. Phones don’t just have one radio in them - there are loads, at least a dozen, to handle different frequency bands. If your phone doesnt have the right radio to pick up/transmit in a carrier’s frequency band, it won’t work with that carrier - it doesn’t have the right hardware.
Locking meanwhile is a software thing, and that can be undone in most cases. Swappa does specify if the phone is unlocked, that’s what those categories are. “Unlocked” is all unlocked phones. The phones you see here, for example, will work with any US carrier: https://swappa.com/listings/google-pixel-9?carrier=unlocked
(And you can put GrapheneOS on it, but I’m just a graphene fanboy daily driving it for several years now so don’t mind me 😂)
Edit: Cricket Wireless is an “MVNO” or “Mobile Virtual Network Operator”. They buy airtime on networks owned by other companies like T-Mobile at wholesale prices, and re-sell the service as their own. You save money on your plan, but if there’s network congestion it’s always the MVNO customers who get slowed down/booted off first.