[poba]

Officemax has a good deal on the Treo 650 (cdma) for Earthlink. Eathlink uses Sprint for it cell infrastructures. My am currently a Sprint (Treo 300) user and could upgrade to the Treo 650 for less than any place else I have found. What I am wondering is if this this phone could be locked to only work with a Eathlink contract and not work with a Sprint contract? If so can it be unlock?

[mbrenner]

Earthlink is CDMA. They use the sprint network (like virgin moble) but they control the account and terms. You cannot use the phone with sprint they will not activate a phone that does not have an ESN that they didn't issue.

CDMA phones have an ESN that is like the IMEI on GSM phones. Unlike GSM which uses the SIM card's ESN to acess the network CDMA uses the Phones ESN. So even an unlocked phone cannot be used on a vendors plan unless they authorize it.

It is similar to trying to get Cingular to allow you to use your phone with a Tmobile SIM installed on a cingular plan. (actually Cingular wont let you use a ATT SIM on a Cingular plan even though they are the same company now) so a CDMA phone is like a GSM phone with a permanantly embedded SIM card.

Verizon apperently let customers use CDMA phones that were Verizon issued on occasion. However in the case of a treo you would need to to a lot of tweeking to get it to work well with data services etc.

[winmax]

Sprints fairly demonic about only activating ESNs in their data base. The Earthink phone is configured for the Sprint network (phone, data, and any thing else), but Sprint will not give you an account for it. That may change if SK-Earthlink goes belly up.

I've just signed on with Earthlink and so far so good.