Cell phones and Hebrew support

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

Stan Goodman <stan.goodman at hashkedim.com> writes:

>  Brand                   HTC                                                 
>
>  MPN                     NO_CARRIERCNETARIABLKATT                            
>
>  Carrier                 Unlocked                                            
>
>  Capacity                512MB                                               
>
>  Network Technology      GSM / WCDMA (UMTS)                                  
>
>  Band                    WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM 850/900/1800/1900                
>
>  What is this "MPN" thing?

If it is not "Manufacturer Part Number" then I don't know what it is.

> I assume that "Capacity" means RAM; is 512MB adequate?

With the caveat of the "how wild are you going to be?" sort it seems
plenty to me. I suspect that if you run enough applications to fill
512MB of memory then you will have a much more immediate problem with
your battery. I cannot recall ever seeing more than a few dozen MB in
use (when I looked, that is) on my SGS, but I am not a heavy
multimedia user or anything like that.

Of course, as serious students of history we may suspect that it will
turn out to be woefully insufficient in a couple of short years... ;-)

> I see that it knows how to operate as several frequencies, but I  
> don't know what that means in terms of Israel providers.

> Are the network technologies the ones that I should be looking for?

Without going into technical detail, GSM is a world-side standard
used in Israel by (IIRC) Orange and Cellcom and by most providers in
Europe and much of the rest of the world, and by many providers in the
US. CDMA is used mostly in the US (in Europe it is practically
non-existent, as far as I know). In Israel, I think Pelephone uses
CDMA. UMTS is what is commonly called "3G" (it is based on the GSM
standard). W-CDMA is "3G" based on CDMA. Your phone claims to - and
probably does :-) - support all of these.

The 4 supported frequency bands also give you global coverage. These
are the bands allocated for cellular communication (in general, lower
frequencies allow providers wider area coverage, and higher
frequencies allow serving more customers in the same area, but you
needn't care about it). Once upon a time (think 15 years ago) some
phones did not support all these bands (in jargon, they were
"dual-band" but not "tri-band" or "quad-band") so you had to check if
your phone would work in California before boarding the plane. Today
it is hardly ever an issue, I think.

So, altogether this means that you can travel around the world with
this handset and use different providers. You should be able to use it
with any of the major providers in Israel (but if you are careful you
will not believe me but will call your favorite provider, at least if
it is Pelephone - there is W-CDMA and CDMA2000 and maybe some other
variant, and I do not remember at all which is used by Pelephone or
whether they are compatible with each other).

I am sure you can find more details than you care about searching
Wikipedia or Googling.
 
> Are there other characteristics that should interest me?

OS? Version? Battery life?

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | pub at goldshmidt.org