If you are looking for a new, unlocked mobile phone then check out the inventory "blowout" over at Amazon. Some decent (and not so decent) deals on anything from a pink Sanyo to a purple LG with a dash of mobile broadband cards thrown in.

They are also offering some "no service required" phones for Sprint and Verizon, which is quite rare. Spare yourself the hassle and potential problems of Ebay, and see if any of their discounted lineup fits your needs.

Purchase link

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I’ll file this under "took them long enough". As of May 25th, AT&T will finally start offering pro-rated ETF’s (Early Termination Fee’s).

For each month you have been with them, they’ll take $5 off the $175 ETF which you’ll have to pay if you decide to leave them before your contract is finished. But since this is a mobile operator, there is of course a catch:

Starting May 25, new and renewing customers will pay $5 less for every month they fulfill of their one- and two-year contracts.

In other words; existing customers are screwed.

Of the big 4, only Sprint and T-mobile have yet to put firm dates to the promises they made of pro-rated ETF’s.

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Last year Verizon surprised everyone by claiming they would open up their network to any CDMA phone that could pass a simple approval test.

Details have finally been released on how this works, and it turns out to be a bit of a crock. The phone has to support CDMA (makes sense), but it also has to support the US E911 emergency system. This essentially means that all the "cool" phones from other CDMA countries (like Korea) will never pass the test.

In fact, I doubt there is a single CDMA phone with E911 that isn’t already supported and approved for use by Verizon. Why would any company make a CDMA device and not have it available for the largest CDMA provider in the country? In reality the entire program will most likely only benefit niche applications and be of no use to us commoners.

You can read more about the Verizon "open development" program here.

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