First, before you go get yourself an unlocked cell phone, it would be wise to know something about why people are unlocking their phones. In general, when buying a new mobile phone, a SIM card is already provided to from a certain carrier. The phone is only configured for use with a specific SIM card. The phone is usually referred to as a locked phone where in you can only use only a SIM card from one carrier. If you use a different SIM card from another carrier a message can be displayed as "SIM card rejected" or "Insert SIM card". When the cell phone is locked, you can only use it in the country where the carrier works or provides service.

Because of the restrictions on the use of locked mobile phones consumers complained that they spend a lot of money changing phones or SIM cards, because they can not use it in another country. Since then providers have allowed consumers to buy or acquire unlocked cell phone provided that they abide by the rules governing unlocking phones. In other countries where mobile phones are unlocked they do not allow to modification of the phone IMEI number. The flash memory on the phone must not also be overwritten or deleted during the process of unlocking the mobile phone. They have restrictions of limitations in unlocking the mobile phone because the providers don’twant to lose profit.. And the bad thing about unlocked cell phone is that you will not be able to avail of your service provider care.

Other people ask of service providers are able to relock their unlocked mobile phone. You can answer is with “no”, but there has been a report that a service provider was able to relock an unlocked cell phone bought by a consumer in a regular store. The situation was that he changed his service provider and without any messages from the provider his phone has been relocked and was forced to just use a SIM card with the phone that used to be an unlocked cell phone. So, if you buy a phone that is unlocked think twice if you want to change service providers, because the same thing can happen to you. You certainly don’t want to waste your money and get frustrated at the end.

To acquire an unlocked phone, you can proceed to regular stores, that offer unlocking services because service providers doesn’t offer such service. There are also sites that offer this service, where you must send your phone, and they will mail back to you once it is unlocked. Another possibility is to acquire an unlocked code, there are service providers, who provide unlocked codes but the phone can only stay unlocked for a certain amount of time like for three years. If you want to verify that your phone is already unlocked you just either need to buy or borrow a SIM card from another carrier. When the phone is unlocked, the error message is not displayed and the contact numbers and messages to be displayed on the phone. All functions of the phone must also work when the phone is unlocked but there are mobile phones that do not work correctly if it is unlocked.