
Across the USA with my unlocked Nokia 9500 using C & T
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.
I bought it new online more than a year ago and payed $700 for it. The vender claimed it works on 800/1900 in the US. In fact it does NOT operate in the 800 band. I had both Cingular and T-mobile DATA accounts, and I switched the SIM cards back and forth to see how it worked all across the USA. I drive coast to coast in a truck, and have loads of time to glance at the phone display, checking the signal strength or seeing the name of a different carrier displayed, such as Conestoga,Viaero, or Union Tel. Oddly enough, the lack of 800 band reception seemed to make very little difference. Most places I went were covered. Since I also have an unlocked Sierra Wireless aircard 775, I would also use both SIM cards in that, which works pretty well with EDGE. My 9500 is slower than the aircard, although it does receive WIFI, which of course is faster. By the way, the Nokia 9300 gets both 850/1900, but not WIFI. I see that Cingular offers theb 9300 at an affordable price AND you,ll get the benefit of their technical support if it is not working the way you think it should be working. By the way, an interesting thing I noticed with the 9500: You can use a scan function to see which GSM carriers are available in the area. When using the T-mobile simcard, the names of any other 1900 GSM carriers within receiving range would be displayed by name. You could then query that carrier to see if you were authorized to roam on them. In some cases, I had the choice of more than one roaming carrier to manually choose from. When attempting this with the Cingular SIMcard, all names on the list would say either Cingular or Roam. It would even read Cingular in areas or states were there is clearly NO cingular coverage.
Review ID: 10000000002361282

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