Verizon wireless phones are mobile handsets that come along with a subscription to one of North America’s largest cellular network service providers. Until recently, just about every manufacturer in the world that makes cell phones can be found in the Verizon catalog, but with Apple’s recent entry this year of its flagship iPhone, Verizon customers now have a complete lineup!
On the other hand, these devices are just commodities now and people don’t really talk about Verizon wireless phones no matter what the roster of available brands are. Things have gotten to be rather like that of table salt, another commodity where there’s more in common than not between competitors. Chalk it up to much changed times: a decade or so before these phones would have been highly sought-after status symbols! But these days everyone has one, such that there’s hardly a street corner with a pay phone anymore.
That’s why many don’t care about something like Verizon wireless phones – they just want something that allows them to talk, first and foremost, carrier be damned! And so carriers have taken to “locking” up their phones (that should be “their” phones, really – more on this in a moment), recognizing that customers have no brand loyalty anymore. Correct: the phone is rendered inoperable when customers switch service providers! You would imagine that since the phone is bought and paid for, it belongs to you, and you can determine which service provider to use it with.
Wrong! Carriers say that because they actually subsidize part of the cost of the phone, they reserve the right to lock those phones when someone is no longer a customer. Curiously, there has been no class-action lawsuit against such a potentially anti-competitive policy, one that’s long been adopted by all the carriers in the industry. It must be the presence of massive and/or numerous legal loopholes, though it’s still a little puzzling how tobacco companies can be defeated but not cellular carriers who disable people’s phones!
But all hope’s not los; there’s a way around the onerous policies. Depending on the kind, GSM or CDMA, one could be unlocked by simply punching a particular code into the keypad!
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