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A comment on Ask YC: Why not give away your old stuff here?. Parent comment

Re:Ask YC: Why not give away your old stuff here? by ieatpaste on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @04:13PM (#452740)
I worked on these. The phone's price is subsidized into the card pricing, so they would loose money if you could do that. They had us design them that there could be no swapping (they are locked to the pay-as-you-go sims). Unlocking requires both software and hardware modifications - at least the phones we made.
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Re:Ask YC: Why not give away your old stuff here? by drewcrawford on Wednesday January 28, 2009 @12:11AM (#453352)
This must be a recent development, because I made extensive use of this trick (1-2 years ago?). Specifically, the $10 walmart ATT go phones worked fine with the contract (3G) SIMs.
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Re:Ask YC: Why not give away your old stuff here? by abyssknight on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @04:28PM (#452766)
I can comment on this. My wife is on tmobile and my father is on ATT, both are using prepaid phones with swapped SIM cards. I know the Virgin mobile phones don't use SIMs (to my knowledge) as well as Tracphone, so those are useless.
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Re:Ask YC: Why not give away your old stuff here? by coryrc on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @04:53PM (#452809)
If you don't power it on with the SIM card, they usually work.
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