Cell Phone Question

[da9integ]

just wodnering what the difference between a tri band phone and a world phone is?

[DNSRadio]

they are the same thing
tri band means that it works on 3 bands

more or less 1 or 2 of those bands will be in a country that you will travel to.

now if you have a quad band phone that is truly a world phone as if it is unlocked you can used it anywhere in the world that you please.

[da9integ]

so if i was to buy a quad band phone and get it unlocked i can put a sim card form any provider and it will work?

[DNSRadio]

yeah
pretty much


just check out japan thou...
i heard some rumors that they have their own network
not too sure about this.
but find out.
other than that yeah
quad band will work pretty much everywhere if its unlocked.

[shakalaka]

Quad band would work almost 100% everywhere, whereas the tri band would work in say around 90% of countries. Has to be GSM.

[em2ab]

Holy hell.....

The band refers to the network frequency. A big selling point for phones back in the day were that they were tri-band..........the worked on 800 analog towers, 800 digital towers and 1900 digital towers. They were also referred to as dual mode because they worked on analog mode and digital mode. But in the last 3 years or so (at least in North America) we've been seeing a demand for phones that will work overseas. And since many of the North American carriers were just resigning partner contracts, one of the negotiations was with companies like Orange and Vodafone to roam onto their networks overseas. So then quad band phones were made.......instead of being 800/800/1900, they were changed to 800/1900/900/1800, adding both GSM frequencies used in Europe and removing analog completely.

So these phones will work on the 800/1900 CDMA networks in North America and the 900/1800 TDMA networks in Europe, but not the 800/1900 GSM networks in North America. That's why you can't use a quad-band Telus phone on GSM here.......only in Europe/Asia.

This is for CDMA quad-band only, of course the Rogers ones will be compatible with all four GSM networks.

EDIT - Most phones now are dual band, my Blackberry will only work on 800/1900 and a long time ago there was a phone released called Mr. Skinny that worked only on 1900, it was a single band phone. Telus released it, it was super skinny because it only had one receiver in it.