Nowadays we can travel the world with unlocked cell phones and make cheap calls home while taking pictures with the camera, playing games and downloading useful apps. It wasn’t always like that though, was it?
credit:guy schmidt@flickr
When I first decided to travel abroad I took my chunky old phone to a specialist shop and asked if I could use it in South America, as I was planning to go there shortly. The guy in the store just kind of laughed at my device and said that I would need to buy one when I got over there. This is a far cry from the ease of today’s free cell phone unlocking process and the amazing amount of things we can do with them once we get to our destination.
To be fair, that old relic of a phone didn’t do much apart from the basics anyway. There was no camera, no music and only a couple of dodgy old ringtones on it. This got to me thinking about the difference between the first phones I ever owned and the current models I now have.
Big, Thick and Pretty Limited
The one I had wanted to travel with was actually my second ever phone, and the first one was even bigger, thicker and more limited. I am almost certain that it was a Nokia and I wish now that I had held onto it to compare with some current phones, as I reckon that it was about 10 times thicker than most of them. Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me but I seem to remember that the battery life was about 2 or 3 hours and I definitely recall having to recharge it every single night beside my bed. It seemed like a revolution a few years later when I first got a cell phone which could run for days without being recharged at all, and it took me a bit of getting used to this to be honest.
The Bosses Get Nice
I finally got a decent one when my bosses at work took a bit of funny turn and decided to waste perfectly good money on looking after their staff. It was a Motorola and I felt at the time that I had finally joined the modern age. I might even have taken to showing off with it a little, but it had some great ring tones so I can be forgiven for that.
Most of us now own a pretty decent level of phone and if you are planning to go abroad like I did all those years ago then looking at free cell phone unlocking is a great idea. I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time and money in phone cabins and call centres in South America trying – and usually failing – to get a decent line home. As it was my first time abroad I didn’t even know what country code I had to dial and my lack of Spanish skills meant that I couldn’t get anyone to help me either. You can get free cell phone unlock codes easily and completely legally online now to avoid this sort of problem.
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