General Question

emilyrose's avatar

Is there a way to hack a cell phone to turn it from verizon to sprint?

Asked by emilyrose (2277points) November 17th, 2007

My sprint phone died and i am having trouble finding a reasonably priced replacement. I have a bunch of friends willing to give me an old verizon phone, but to my knowledge I cant actually do that. any hackers out there think i could actually do this? or anyone in the bay area with a sprint phone I can buy?

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7 Answers

ezraglenn's avatar

there is no way to do that because they operate on different signals, I beleive. It’s like how you can’t use a GSM phone with a non-GSM provider, although I beleive sprint is something totally different (and totally worse).

emilyrose's avatar

wah. i figured. yah sprint does seem lame. what do you recommend?

Espin01's avatar

Ok. There is absolutely no way to go from verison to anything. This is because verison phones do not use a SIM card, which almost all other service providers use. However, it is possible to go from one carrier to another if they both use SIM cards, ie Cingular to T-Mobile. All you have to do for this is unlock the phone (this can be difficult, you’ll just need to search the internet for how to do it) and then put your SIM card in the phone you want to use. But, like I said, this is impossible to do with Verison because of the lack of SIM card.

ezraglenn's avatar

most people like verizon, so it doesn’t matter that you can’t switch out of it.

segdeha's avatar

To follow up on Espin01’s answer, you don’t even have to hack the phone in most cases. You can contact the carrier and they will send you a SIM unlock code. They’re not always happy about it, but if you persist, they will do it.

ccatron's avatar

Sprint and Verizon are two of the companies that do not use SIM cards, but if the phone is not compatible with the network, then you’re out of luck…from what I understand.

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